What Is Literature

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YALE UNIVERSITY

With the aid of the

ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

1949

OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Call No. %&V/S#/ & Accession No. <?? 37

Author 2-^ - . r>

This bookihould be returned on or before the date last marked below.

WHAT IS
LITERATURE?

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Translated from the French

by
BERNARD FRECHTMAN

PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1949, by

Philosophical Library, Inc.

15 EAST 40th Street, New York, N.Y.

Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword

I What is Writing? 7

II Why Write? 38

III For Whom Does One Write? 67

IV Situation of the Writer in 1947 161
Index 299

FOREWORD

"If you want to engage yourself," writes a young im-
becile, "what are you waiting for? Join the Communist
Party." A great writer who engaged himself often and
disengaged himself still more often, but who has forgotten,
said to me, "The worst artists are the most engaged. Look
at the Soviet painters" An old critic gently complained,
"You want to murder literature. Contempt for belles-let-
tres is spread out insolently all through your review." A
petty mind calls me pigheaded, which for him is evidently
the highest insult. An author who barely crawled from
one war to the other and whose name sometimes awakens
languishing memories in old men accuses me of not being
concerned with immortality; he knows, thank God, any
number of people whose chief hope it is. In the eyes of
an American hack-journalist the trouble with me is that
I have not read Bergson or Freud; as for Flaubert, who
did not engage himself, it seems that he haunts me like
remorse. Smart-alecks wink at me, "And poetry? And
painting? And music? You want to engage them, too?"
And some martial spirits demand, "What's it all about?
Engaged literature? Well, it's the old socialist realism,
unless it's a revival of populism, only more aggressive."

What nonsense. They read quickly, badly, and pass
judgment before they have understood. So let's begin all
over. This doesn't amuse anyone, neither you nor me. But

we have to hit the nail on the head. And since critics
condemn me in the name of literature without ever say-
ing what they mean by that, the best answer to give them
is to examine the art of writing without prejudice. What
is writing? Why does one write? For whom? The fact is,
it seems that nobody has ever asked himself these
questions.

WHAT IS WRITING?

No, we do not want to "engage" painting, sculpture,
and music "too/ 5 or at least not in the same way. And why
would we want to? When a writer of past centuries ex-
pressed an opinion about his craft, was he immediately
asked to apply it to the other arts? But today it's the thing
to do to "talk painting 55 in the argot of the musician or
the literary man and to "talk literature 55 in the argot of
the painter, as if at bottom there were only one art which
expressed itself indifferently in one or the other of these
languages, like the Spinozistic substance which is ade-
quately reflected by each of its attributes.

Doubtless, one could find at the origin of every artistic
calling a certain undifferentiated choice which circum-
stances, education, and contact with the world particu-
larized only later. Besides, there is no doubt that the arts
of a period mutually influence each other and are con-
ditioned by the same social factors. But those who want
to expose the absurdity of a literary theory by showing
that it is inapplicable to music must first prove that the
arts are parallel.

Now, there is no such parallelism. Here, as everywhere,
it is not only the form which differentiates, but the matter

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

as well. And it is one thing to work with color and sound,
and another to express oneself by means of words. Notes,
colors, and forms are not signs. They refer to nothing
exterior to themselves. To be sure, it is quite impossible
to reduce them strictly to themselves, and the idea of a
pure sound, for example, is an abstraction. As Merleau-
Ponty has pointed out in The Phenomenology of Per-
ception, there is no quality of sensation so bare that it is
not penetrated with signification. But the dim little mean-
ing which dwells within it, a light joy, a timid sadness,
remains immanent or trembles about it like a heat mist;
it is color or sound. Who can distinguish the green apple
from its tart gaiety? And aren't we already saying too
much in naming "the tart gaiety of the green apple?"
There is green, there is red, and that is all. They are
things, they exist by themselves.

It is true that one might, by convention, confer the
value of signs upon them. Thus, we talk of the language
of flowers. But if, after the agreement, white roses signify
"fidelity 55 to me, the fact is that I have stopped seeing
them as roses. My attention cuts through them to aim
beyond them at this abstract virtue. I forget them. I no
longer pay attention to their mossy abundance, to their
sweet stagnant odor. I have not even perceived them.
That means that I have not behaved like an artist. For
the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon
on the saucer, are things, in the highest degree. He stops
at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it
constantly and is enchanted with it. It is this color-object
that he is going to transfer to his canvas, and the only
modification he will make it undergo is that he will

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WHAT IS WRITING?

transform it into an imaginary object. He is therefore as
far as he can be from considering colors and signs as a
language. 1

What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is
also valid for their combinations. The painter does not
want to create a thing. 2 And if he puts together red, yel-
low, and green, there is no reason for the ensemble to
have a definable signification, that is, to refer particularly
to another object. Doubtless this ensemble is also inhab-
ited by a soul, and since there must have been motives,
even hidden ones, for the painter to have chosen yellow
rather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thus
created reflect his deepest tendencies. However, they never
express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or
the expression of the face; they are impregnated with
these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into
these colors, which by themselves already had something
like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow
obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.

Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky
above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It
is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of
anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing,
an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and
which thereby is submerged and impasted by the proper
qualities of things, by their impermeability, their exten-
sion, their blind permanence, their externality, and that
infinity of relations which they maintain with other things.
That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense
and vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

and earth, to express what their nature keeps them
from expressing.

Similarly, the signification of a melody if one can
still speak of signification is nothing outside of the mel-
ody itself, unlike ideas, which can be adequately rendered
in several ways. Call it joyous or somber. It will always
be over and above anything you can say about it. Not be-
cause its passions, which are perhaps at the origin of the
invented theme, have, by being incorporated into notes,
undergone a transubstantiation and a transmutation. A
cry of grief is a sign of the grief which provokes it,
but a song of grief is both grief itself and something other
than grief. Or, if one wishes to adopt the existentialist
vocabulary, it is a grief which does not exist any more,
which is. But, you will say, suppose the painter does
houses? That's just it. He makes them, that is, he creates
an imaginary house on the canvas and not a sign of a
house. And the house which thus appears preserves all
the ambiguity of real houses.

The writer can guide you and, if he describes a hovel,
make it seem the symbol of social injustice and provoke
your indignation. The painter is mute. He presents you
with a hovel, thatV all. You are free to see in it what
you like. That attic window will never be the symbol of
misery; for that, it would have to be a sign, whereas it is
a thing. The bad painter looks for the type. He paints
the Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knows
that neither the Arab nor the proletarian exists either in
reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain
workman. And what are we to think about a workman?
An infinity of contradictory things. All thoughts and all

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

feelings are there, adhering to the canvas in a state of
profound undifferentiation. It is up to you to choose.
Sometimes, high-minded artists try to move us. They
paint long lines of workmen waiting in the snow to be
hired, the emaciated faces of the unemployed, battle-
fields. They affect us no more than does Greuze with
his "Prodigal Son. 53 And that masterpiece, "The Massa-
cre of Guernica, 55 does any one think that it won over a
single heart to the Spanish cause? And yet something
is said that can never quite be heard and that would take
an infinity of words to express. And Picasso 5 s long harle-
quins, ambiguous and eternal, haunted with inexplicable
meaning, inseparable from their stooping leanness and
their pale diamond-shaped tights, are emotion become
flesh, emotion which the flesh has absorbed as the blotter
absorbs ink, and emotion which is unrecognizable, lost,
strange to itself, scattered to the four corners of space
and yet present to itself.

I have no doubt that charity or anger can produce
other objects, but they will likewise be swallowed up;
they will lose their name; there will remain only things
haunted by a mysterious soul. One does not paint signifi-
cations; one does not put them to music. Under these
conditions, who would dare require that the painter or
musician engage himself?

On the other hand, the writer deals with significations.
Still, a distinction must be made. The empire of signs is
prose; poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and
music. I am accused of detesting it; the proof, so they say,
is that Les Temps Modernes publishes very few poems.
On the contrary, this is proof that we like it. To be con-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

vinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporary
production. "At least/ 5 critics say triumphantly, "you
can't even dream of engaging it." Indeed. But why should
I want to? Because it uses words as does prose? But it
does not use them in the same way, and it does not even
use them at all, I should rather say that it serves them.
Poets are men who refuse to utilize language. Now, since
the quest for truth takes place in and by language con-
ceived as a certain kind of instrument, it is unnecessary to
imagine that they aim to discern or expound the true.
Nor do they dream of naming the world, and, this being
the case, they name nothing at all, for naming implies a
perpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or,
as Hegel would say, the name is revealed as the inessen-
tial in the face of the thing which is essential. They do
not speak, neither do they keep still; it is something dif-
ferent. It has been said that they wanted to destroy the
"word" by monstrous couplings, but this is false. For then
they would have to be thrown into the midst of utilitarian
language and would have had to try to retrieve words
from it in odd little groups, as for example "horse" and
"butter" by writing "horses of butter." 3

Besides the fact that such an enterprise would require
infinite time, it is not conceivable that one can keep one-
self on the plane of the utilitarian project, consider words
as instruments, and at the same contemplate taking their
instrumentality away from them. In fact, the poet has
withdrawn from language-instrument in a single move-
ment. Once and for all he has chosen the poetic attitude
which considers words as things and not as signs. For the
ambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at

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WHAT IS WRITING?

will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or
turn his gaze toward its reality and consider it as an ob-
ject. The man who talks is beyond words and near the
object, whereas the poet is on this side of them. For the
former, they are domesticated; for the latter they are
in the wild state. For the former, they are useful conven-
tions, tools which gradually wear out and which one
throws away when they are no longer serviceable; for
the latter, they are natural things which sprout naturally
upon the earth like grass and trees.

But if he dwells upon words, as does the painter with
colors and the musician with sounds, that does not mean
that they have lost all signification in his eyes. Indeed, it
is signification alone which can give words their verbal
unity. Without it they are frittered away into sounds and
strokes of the pen. Only, it too becomes natural. It is no
longer the goal which is always out of reach and which
human transcendence is always aiming at, but a property
of each term, analogous to the expression of a face, to
the little sad or gay meaning of sounds and colors. Having
flowed into the word, having been absorbed by its sonority
or visual aspect, having been thickened and defaced, it
too is a thing, increate and eternal.

For the poet, language is a structure of the external
world. The speaker is in a situation in language; he is in-
vested with words. They are prolongations of his mean-
ings, his pincers, his antennae, his eyeglasses. He maneuv-
ers them from within; he feels them as if they were
his body; he is surrounded by a verbal body which he is
hardly aware of and which extends his action upon the
world. The poet is outside of language. He sees words

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

inside out as if he did not share the human condition,
and as if he were first meeting the word as a barrier as
he comes toward men. Instead of first knowing things
by their name, it seems that first he has a silent contact
with them, since, turning toward that other species of
thing which for him is the word, touching them, testing
them, palping them, he discovers in them a slight lumi-
nosity of their own and particular affinities with the
earth, the sky, the water, and all created things.

Not knowing how to use them as a sign of an aspect
of the world, he sees in the word the image of one of
these aspects. And the verbal image he chooses for its
resemblance to the willow tree or the ash tree is not neces-
sarily the word which we use to designate these objects. As
he is already on the outside, he considers words as a trap
to catch a fleeing reality rather than as indicators which
throw him out of himself into the midst of things. In
short, all language is for him the mirror of the world. As
a result, important changes take place in the internal
economy of the word. Its sonority, its length, its masculine
or feminine endings, its visual aspect, compose for him
a face of flesh which represents rather than expresses
signification. Inversely, as the signification is realized, the
physical aspect of the word is reflected within it, and it,
in its turn, functions as an image of the verbal body. Like
its sign, too, for it has lost its pre-eminence; since words,
like things, are increate, the poet does not decide whether
the former exist for the latter or vice-versa.

Thus, between the word and the thing signified, there
is established a double reciprocal relation of magical re-
semblance and signification. And the poet does not utilize

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WHAT IS WRITING?

the word, he does not choose between diverse accepta-
tions; each of them, instead of appearing to him as an
autonomous function, is given to him as a material qual-
ity which merges before his eyes with the other accep-
tation.

Thus, in each word he realizes, solely by the effect of
the poetic attitude, the metaphors which Picasso dreamed
of when he wanted to do a matchbox which was com-
pletely a bat without ceasing to be a matchbox. Florence
is city, flower, and woman. It is city-flower, city-woman,
and girl-flower all at the same time. And the strange
object which thus appears has the liquidity of the river >
the soft, tawny ardency of gold> and finally aban-
dons itself with propriety and, by the continuous diminu-
tion of the silent , prolongs indefinitely its modest blos-
soming.* To that is added the insidious effect of biog-
raphy. For me, Florence is also a certain woman, an
American actress who played in the silent films of my
childhood, and about whom I have forgotten everything
except that she was as long as a long evening glove and
always a bit weary and always chaste and always married
and misunderstood and whom I loved and whose name
was Florence.

For the word, which tears the writer of prose away
from himself and throws him into the midst of the world,
sends back to the poet his own image, like a mirror.

; . i nil

"This sentence is not fully intelligible in translation as the author is here
associating the component sounds of the word Florence with the signification
of the French words they evoke. Thus: FL-OR-ENCE, fleuve (river), or
(gold), and dfaence (propriety). The latter part of the sentence refers to the
practice in French poetry of giving, in certain circumstances, a syllabic
value to the otherwise silent terminal e. Translator's note.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

This is what justifies the double undertaking of Leiris
who, on the one hand, in his Glossary, tries to give certain
words a poetic definition, that is, one which is by itself a
synthesis of reciprocal implications between the sonorous
body and the verbal soul, and, on the other hand, in a
still unpublished work, goes in quest of remembrance of
things past, taking as guides a few words which for him
are particularly charged with aff ectivity. Thus, the poetic
word is a microcosm.

The crisis of language which broke out at the begin-
ning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the so-
cial and historical factors, it manifested itself by attacks
of depersonalization of the writer in the face of words.
He no longer knew how to use them, and, in Bergson's
famous formula, he only half recognized them. He
approached them with a completely fruitful feeling of
strangeness. They were no longer his; they were no longer
he; but in those strange mirrors, the sky, the earth, and
his own life were reflected. And, finally, they be-
came things themselves, or rather the black heart of
things. And when the poet joins several of these micro-
cosms together the case is like that of painters when they
assemble their colors on the canvas. One might think that
he is composing a sentence, but this is only what it ap-
pears to be. He is creating an object. The words-things
are grouped by magical associations of fitness and in-
congruity, like colors and sounds. They attract, repel,
and "burn" one another, and their association composes
the veritable poetic unity which is the phrase-object.

More often the poet first has the scheme of the sen-
tence in his mind, and the words follow. But this scheme

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WHAT IS WRITING?

has nothing in common with what one ordinarily calls a
verbal scheme. It does not govern the construction
of a signification. Rather, it is comparable to the creative
project by which Picasso, even before touching his brush,
prefigures in space the thing which will become a buffoon
or a harlequin.

To flee, to flee there, I feel that birds are drunk
But, oh, my heart, hear the song of the sailors.
(Fuir, la-bas fuir, je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres
Mais o mon coeur entends le chant des matelots.}

This "but" which rises like a monolith at the thresh-
old of the sentence does not tie the second verse to the pre-
ceding one. It colors it with a certain reserved nuance,
with "private associations 55 which penetrate it completely.
In the same way, certain poems begin with "and. 55 This
conjunction no longer indicates to the mind an operation
which is to be carried out; it extends throughout the
paragraph to give it the absolute quality of a sequel. For
the poet, the sentence has a tonality, a taste; by means
of it he tastes for their own sake the irritating flavors of
objection, of reserve, of disjunction. He carries them to
the absolute. He makes them real properties of the sen-
tence, which becomes an utter objection without being
an objection to anything precise. He finds here those
relations of reciprocal implication which we pointed out
a short time ago between the poetic word and its mean-
ing; the ensemble of the words chosen functions as an
image of the interrogative or restrictive nuance, and vice-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

versa, the interrogation is an image of the verbal en-
semble which it delimits.

As in the following admirable verses:

Oh seasons! Oh castles!
What soul is faultless?
(O saisons! O chateaux!
Quelle dme est sans defaut?)

Nobody is questioned; nobody is questioning; the poet
is absent. And the question involves no answer, or rather
it is its own answer. Is it therefore a false question? But
it would be absurd to believe that Rimbaud "meant"
that everybody has his faults. As Breton said of Saint-Pol
Roux, "If he had meant it, he would have said it. 55 Nor
did he mean to say something else. He asked an absolute
question. He conferred upon the beautiful word "soul" an
interrogative existence. The interrogation has become a
thing as the anguish of Tintoretto became a yellow sky.
It is no longer a signification, but a substance. It is seen
from the outside, and Rimbaud invites us to see it from
the outside with him. Its strangeness arises from the fact
that, in order to consider it, we place ourselves on the
other side of the human condition, on the side of God.

If this is the case, one easily understands how foolish
it would be to require a poetic engagement. Doubtless,
emotion, even passion and why not anger, social in-
dignation, and political hatred? are at the origin of the
poem. But they are not expressed there, as in a pamphlet
or in a confession. Insofar as the writer of prose exhibits
feelings, he illustrates them; whereas, if the poet injects

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WHAT IS WRITING?

his feelings into his poem, he ceases to recognize them;
the words take hold of them, penetrate them, and meta-
morphose them; they do not signify them, even in his
eyes. Emotion has become thing; it now has the opacity
of things; it is compounded by the ambiguous properties
of the vocables in which it has been enclosed. And above
all, there is always much more in each phrase, in each
verse, as there is more than simple anguish in the yellow
sky over Golgotha. The word, the phrase-thing, inexhaust-
ible as things, everywhere overflows the feeling which
has produced them. How can one hope to provoke the
indignation or the political enthusiasm of the reader when
the very thing one does is to withdraw him from the hu-
man condition and invite him to consider with the eyes
of God a language that has been turned inside out? Some-
one may say, "You're forgetting the poets of the Re-
sistance. You're forgetting Pierre Emmanuel. 55 Not a bit!
They're the very ones I was going to give as examples. 4
But even if the poet is forbidden to engage himself, is
that a reason for exempting the writer of prose? What
do they have in common? It is true that the prosewriter
and the poet both write. But there is nothing in com-
mon between these two acts of writing except the
movement of the hand which traces the letters. Other-
wise, their universes are incommunicable, and what is
good for one is not good for the other. Prose is, in essence,
utilitarian. I would readily define the prose-writer as a
man who makes use of words. M. Jourdan made prose
to ask for his slippers, and Hitler to declare war on Po-
land. The writer is a speaker; he designates, demonstrates,
orders, refuses, interpolates, begs, insults, persuades, in-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

sinuates. If he does so without any effect, he does not
therefore become a poet; he is a writer who is talking
and saying nothing. We have seen enough of language in-
side out; it is now time to look at it right side out. 5

The art of prose is employed in discourse; its substance
is by nature significative; that is, the words are first of all
not objects but designations for objects; it is not first of
all a matter of knowing whether they please or dis-
please in themselves, but whether they correctly indicate
a certain thing or a certain notion. Thus, it often happens
that we find ourselves possessing a certain idea that some-
one has taught us by means of words without being able
to recall a single one of the words which have transmitted
it to us.

Prose is first of all an attitude of mind. As Valery
would say, there is prose when the word passes across our
gaze as the glass across the sun. When one is in danger
or in difficulty he grabs any instrument. When the dan-
ger is past, he does not even remember whether it was a
hammer or a stick; moreover, he never knew; all he
needed was a prolongation of his body, a means of ex-
tending his hand to the highest branch. It was a sixth
finger, a third leg, ia short, a pure function which he
assimilated. Thus, regarding language, it is our shell and
our antennae; it protects us against others and informs
us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third
eye which is going to look into our neighbor's heart. We
are within language as within our body. We feel it spon-
taneously while going beyond it toward other ends, as
we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive it when it is
the other who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of

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WHAT IS WRITING?

others. There is the word which is lived and the word
which is met. But in both cases it is in the course of an
undertaking, either of me acting upon others, or the other
upon me. The word is a certain particular moment of
action and has no meaning outside of it. In certain cases
of aphasia the possibilities of acting, of understanding
situations, and of having normal relations with the other
sex, are lost.

At the heart of this apraxia the destruction of lan-
guage appears only as the collapse of one of the structures,
the finest and the most apparent. And if prose is never
anything but the privileged instrument of a certain un-
dertaking, if it is only the poet's business to contemplate
words in a disinterested fashion, then one has the right
to ask the prose-writer from the very start, "What is your
aim in writing? What undertakings are you engaged in,
and why does it require you to have recourse to writing? 55
In any case this undertaking cannot have pure contem-
plation as an end. For, intuition is silence, and the end of
language is to communicate. One can doubtless pin down
the results of intuition, but in this case a few words
hastily scrawled on paper will suffice; it will always
be enough for the author to recognize what he had in
mind. If the words are assembled into sentences, with a
concern for clarity, a decision foreign to the intuition,
to the language itself, must intervene, the decision of
confiding to others the results obtained. In each case
one must ask the reason for this decision. And the com-
mon sense which our pedants too readily forget never
stops repeating it. Are we not in the habit of putting this
basic question to young people who are thinking of writ-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

ing: "Do you have anything to say?" Which means:
something which is worth the trouble of being com-
municated. But what do we mean by something which
is "worth the trouble" if it is not by recourse to a system
of transcendent values?

Moreover, to consider only this secondary structure of
the undertaking, which is what the verbal moment is,
the serious error of pure stylists is to think that the
word is a gentle breeze which plays lightly over the
surface of things, which grazes them without altering
them, and that the speaker is a pure witness who sums
up with a word his harmless contemplation. To speak
is to act; anything which one names is already no longer
quite the same; it has lost its innocence.

If you name the behavior of an individual, you reveal
it to him; he sees himself. And since you are at the same
time naming it to all others, he knows that he is seen at
the moment he sees himself. The furtive gesture which
he forgot while making it, begins to exist beyond all
measure, to exist for everybody; it is integrated into the
objective mind; it takes on new dimensions; it is retrieved.
After that, how can you expect him to act in the same
way? Either he will persist in his behavior out of obstin-
acy and with full knowledge of what he is doing, or he
will give it up. Thus, by speaking, I reveal the situation
by my very intention of changing it; I reveal it to myself
and to others in order to change it. I strike at its very
heart, I transpierce it, and I display it in full view; at
present I dispose of it; with every word I utter, I involve
myself a little more in the world, and by the same token

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WHAT IS WRITING?

I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it to-
ward the future.

Thus, the prose-writer is a man who has chosen a cer-
tain method of secondary action which we may call action
by disclosure. It is therefore permissible to ask him this
second question: "What aspect of the world do you
want to disclose? What change do you want to bring into
the world by this disclosure?" The "engaged 55 writer
knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to
change and that one can reveal only by planning to
change. He has given up the impossible dream of giving
an impartial picture of Society and the human condition.
Man is the being toward whom no being can be
impartial, not even God. For God, if He existed, would
be, as certain mystics have seen Him, in a situation in
relationship to man. And He is also the being Who can
not even see a situation without changing it, for His gaze
congeals, destroys, or sculpts, or, as does eternity, changes
the object in itself. It is in love, in hate, in anger, in fear,
in joy, in indignation, in admiration, in hope, in despair,
that man and the world reveal themselves in their truth.
Doubtless, the engaged writer can be mediocre; he can
even be conscious of being so; but as one can not write
without the intention of succeeding perfectly, the modesty
with which he envisages his work should not divert him
from constructing it as if it were to have the greatest
celebrity. He should never say to himself "Bah! I'll be
lucky if I have three thousand readers, 33 but rather,
"What would happen if everybody read what I wrote? 55
He remembers what Mosca said beside the coach which
carried Fabrizio and Sanseverina away, "If the word Love

23

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

comes up between them, I'm lost." He knows that he is
the man who names what has not yet been named or
what dares not tell its name. He knows that he makes
the word "love 53 and the word "hate" surge up and
with them love and hate between men who had not yet
decided upon their feelings. He knows that words, as
Brice-Parrain says, are "loaded pistols. 55 If he speaks,
he fires. He may be silent, but since he has chosen to
fire, he must do it like a man, by aiming at targets, and
not like a child, at random, by shutting his eyes and firing
merely for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off.

Later on we shall try to determine what the goal of lit-
erature may be. But from this point on we may conclude
that the writer has chosen to reveal the world and particu-
larly to reveal man to other men so that the latter may
assume full responsibility before the object which has
been thus laid bare. It is assumed that no one is ignorant
of the law because there is a code and because the law is
written down; thereafter, you are free to violate it, but
you know the risks you run. Similarly, the function of the
writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant
of the world and that nobody may say that he is in-
nocent of what it 5 s all .about. And since he has once en-
gaged himself in the universe of language, he can never
again pretend that he can not speak. Once you enter the
universe of significations, there is nothing you can do to
get out of it. Let words organize themselves freely and
they will make sentences, and each sentence contains lan-
guage in its entirety and refers back to the whole universe.
Silence itself is defined in relationship to words, as the
pause in music receives its meaning from the group of

24

WHAT IS WRITING?

notes around it. This silence is a moment of language;
being silent is not being dumb; it is to refuse to speak,
and therefore to keep on speaking. Thus, if a writer has
chosen to remain silent on any aspect whatever of the
world, or, according to an expression which says just what
it means, to pass over it in silence, one has the right to
ask him a third question: "Why have you spoken of this
rather than that, and since you speak in order to bring
about change why do you want to change this rather
than that? 53

All this does not prevent there being a manner of writ-
ing. One is not a writer for having chosen to say certain
things, but for having chosen to say them in a certain way.
And, to be sure, the style makes the value of the prose.
But it should pass unnoticed. Since words are transparent
and since the gaze looks through them, it would be ab-
surd to slip in among them some panes of rough glass.
Beauty is in this case only a gentle and imperceptible
force. In a painting it shines forth at the very first sight;
in a book it hides itself; it acts by persuasion like the
charm of a voice or a face. It does not coerce; it inclines
a person without his suspecting it, and he thinks that he
is yielding to arguments when he is really being solicited
by a charm that he does not see. The ceremonial of the
mass is not faith; it disposes the harmony of words; their
beauty, the balance of the phrases, dispose the passions
of the reader without his being aware and orders them
like the mass, like music, like the dance. If he happens
to consider them by themselves, he loses the meaning;
there remains only a boring seesaw of phrases.

In prose the aesthetic pleasure is pure only if it is

25

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

thrown into the bargain. I blush at recalling such simple
ideas, but it seems that today they have been forgotten.
If that were not the case, would we be told that we are
planning the murder of literature, or, more simply, that
engagement is harmful to the art of writing? If the con-
tamination of a certain kind of prose by poetry had not
confused the ideas of our critics, would they dream of
attacking us on the matter of form, when we have never
spoken of anything but the content? There is nothing
to be said about form in advance, and we have said
nothing. Everyone invents his own, and one judges it
afterward. It is true that the subjects suggest the style,
but they do not order it. There are no styles ranged
a priori outside of the literary art. What is more en-
gaged, what is more boring than the idea of attacking the
Jesuits? Yet, out of this Pascal made his Provincial Let-
ters. In short, it is a matter of knowing what one wants
to write about, whether butterflies or the condition of
the Jews. And when one knows, then it remains to de-
cide how one will write about it.

Often the two choices are only one, but among good
writers the second choice never precedes the first. I
know that Giraudoux has said that "the only concern
is finding the style; the idea comes afterwards; 55 but he
was wrong. The idea did not come. On the contrary, if
one considers subjects as problems which are always open,
as solicitations, as expectations, it will be easily under-
stood that art loses nothing in engagement. On the con-
trary, just as physics submits to mathematicians new
problems which require them to produce a new sym-
bolism, in like manner the always new requirements of

26

WHAT IS WRITING?

the social and the metaphysical engage the artist in find-
ing a new language and new techniques. If we no longer
write as they did in the eighteenth century, it is because
the language of Racine and Saint-Evremond does not
lend itself to talking about locomotives or the proletariat.
After that, the purists will perhaps forbid us to write
about locomotives. But art has never been on the side of
the purists.

If that is the principle of engagement, what objection
can one have to it? And above all what objection has
been made to it? It has seemed to me that my opponents
have not had their hearts in their work very much and
that their articles contain nothing more than a long
scandalized sigh which drags on over two or three col-
umns. I should have liked to know in the name of what,
with what conception of literature, they condemned en-
gagement. But they have not said; they themselves have
not known. The most reasonable thing would have been
to support their condemnation on the old theory of art
for art's sake. But none of them can accept it. That is
also disturbing. We know very well that pure art and
empty art are the same thing and that aesthetic purism
was a brilliant maneuver of the bourgeois of the last cen-
tury who preferred to see themselves denounced as phil-
istines rather than as exploiters. Therefore, they them-
selves admitted that the writer had to speak about some-
thing. But about what? I believe that their embarrass-
ment would have been extreme if Fernandez had not
found for them, after the other war, the notion of the
message. The writer of today, they say, should in no case
occupy himself with temporal affairs. Neither should he

27

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

set up lines without signification nor seek solely beauty
of phrase and of imagery. His function is to deliver mes-
sages to his readers. Well, what is a message?

It must be borne in mind that most critics are men
who have not had much luck and who, just about the
time they were growing desperate, found a quiet little
job as cemetery watchmen. God knows whether ceme-
teries are peaceful; none of them are more cheerful than a
library. The dead are there; the only thing they have
done is write. They have long since been washed clean
of the sin of living, and besides, their lives are known
only through other books which other dead men have
written about them. Rimbaud is dead. So are Paterne
Berrichon and Isabelle Rimbaud. The trouble makers
have disappeared; all that remains are the little coffins
that are stacked on shelves along the walls like urns in
a columbarium. The critic lives badly; his wife does
not appreciate him as she ought to; his children are
ungrateful; the first of the month is hard on him. But it
is always possible for him to enter his library, take down
a book from the shelf, and open it. It gives off a slight
odor of the cellar, and a strange operation begins which
he has decided to call reading. From one point of view
it is a possession; he lends his body to the dead in order
that they may come back to life. And from another point
of view it is a contact with the beyond. Indeed, the book
is by no means an object; neither is it an act, nor even a
thought. Written by a dead man about dead things,
it no longer has any place on this earth; it speaks of
nothing which interests us directly. Left to itself, it falls
back and collapses; there remain only ink spots on musty

28

WHAT IS WRITING?

paper. And when the critic reanimates these spots, when
he makes letters and words of them, they speak to him
of passions which he does not feel, of bursts of anger
without objects, of dead fears and hopes. It is a whole
disembodied world which surrounds him, where human
feelings, because they are no longer affecting, have passed
on to the status of exemplary feelings and, in a word,
of values. So he persuades himself that he has entered
into relations with an intelligible world which is like the
truth of his daily sufferings. And their reason for being.
He thinks that nature imitates art, as for Plato the world
of the senses imitates that of the archetypes. And during
the time he is reading, his everyday life becomes an ap-
pearance. His nagging wife 3 his hunchbacked son, they
too are appearances. And he will put up with them be-
cause Xenophon has drawn the portrait of Xantippe and
Shakespeare that of Richard the Third.

It is a holiday for him when contemporary authors do
him the favor of dying. Their books, too raw, too living,
too urgent, pass on to the other shore; they become less
and less affecting and more and more beautiful. After a
short stay in Purgatory they go on to people the intel-
ligible heaven with new values. Bergotte, Swann, Sieg-
fried and Bella, and Monsieur Teste are recent acquisi-
tions. He is waiting for Nathanael and Menalque. As for
the writers who persist in living, he asks them only not to
move about too much, and to make an effort to resemble
from now on the dead men they will be. Valery, who for
twenty-five years had been publishing posthumous books,
managed the matter very nicely. That is why, like some

29

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

highly exceptional saints, he was canonized during his
lifetime. But Malraux is scandalous.

Our critics are Catharians. They don't want to have
anything to do with the real world except eat and drink
in it, and since it is absolutely necessary to have relations
with our fellow-creatures, they have chosen to have them
with the defunct. They get excited only about classified
matters, closed quarrels, stories whose ends are known.
They never bet on uncertain issues, and since history has
decided for them, since the objects which terrified or
angered the authors they read have disappeared, since
bloody disputes seem futile at a distance of two centuries,
they can be charmed with balanced periods, and every-
thing happens for them as if all literature were only a
vast tautology and as if every new prose-writer had in-
vented a new way of speaking only for the purpose of
saying nothing.

To speak of archetypes and "human nature" is that
speaking in order to say nothing? All the conceptions of
our critics oscillate from one idea to the other. And, of
course, both of them are false. Our great writers wanted
to destroy, to edify, to demonstrate. But we no longer
retain the proofs which they have advanced because
we have no concern with what they mean to prove. The
abuses which they denounced are no longer those of our
time. There are others which rouse us which they did
not suspect. History has given the lie to some of their
predictions, and those which have been fulfilled became
true so long ago that we have forgotten that they were
at first flashes of their genius. Some of their thoughts are
utterly dead, and there are others which the whole hu-

30

WHAT IS WRITING?

man race has taken up to its advantage and which we
now regard as commonplace. It follows that the best
arguments of these writers have lost their effectiveness.
We admire only their order and rigor. Their most com-
pact composition is in our eyes only an ornament, an
elegant architecture of exposition, with no more practical
application than such architectures as the fugues of
Bach and the arabesques of the Alhambra.

We are still moved by the passion of these impassioned
geometries when the geometry no longer convinces us.
Or rather by the representation of the passion. In the
course of centuries the ideas have turned flat, but they
remain the little personal objectives of a man who was
once flesh and bone; behind the reasons of reason, which
languish, we perceive the reasons of the heart, the virtues,
the vices, and that great pain that men have in living.
Sade does his best to win us over, but we hardly find him
scandalous. He is no longer anything but a soul eaten by
a beautiful disease, a pearl-oyster. The Letter on the
Theater no longer keeps anyone from going to the theater,
but we find it piquant that Rousseau detested the art of
the drama. If we are a bit versed in psychoanalysis, our
pleasure is perfect. We shall explain the Social Contract
by the Oedipus complex and The Spirit of the Laws
by the inferiority complex. That is, we shall fully enjoy
the well-known superiority of live dogs to dead lions.
Thus, when a book presents befuddled thoughts which
appear to be reasons only to melt under scrutiny and to
be reduced to heart beats, when the teaching that one
can draw from it is radically different from what its
author intended, the book is called a message. Rousseau,

31

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the father of the French Revolution, and Gobineau, the
father of racism, both sent us messages. And the critic
considers them with equal sympathy. If they were alive,
he would have to choose between the two, to love one
and hate the other. But what brings them together,
above all, is that they are both profoundly and deliciously
wrong, and in the same way: they are dead.

Thus, contemporary writers should be advised to de-
liver messages, that is, voluntarily to limit their writing
to the involuntary expression of their souls. I say in-
voluntary because the dead, from Montaigne to Rim-
baud, have painted themselves completely, but without
having meant to it is something they have simply
thrown into the bargain. The surplus which they have
given us unintentionally should be the primary and
professed goal of living writers. They are not to be forced
to give us confessions without any dressing, nor are they
to abandon themselves to the too-naked lyricism of the
romantics. But since we find pleasure in foiling the ruses
of Chateaubriand or Rousseau, in surprising them in
the secret places of their being at the moment they are
playing at being the public man, in distinguishing the
private motives from their most universal assertions, we
shall ask newcomers to procure us this pleasure deliber-
ately. So let them reason, assert, deny, refute, and prove;
but the cause they are defending must be only the ap-
parent aim of their discourse; the deeper goal is to yield
themselves without seeming to do so. They must first
disarm themselves of their arguments as time has done
for those of the classic writers; they must bring them to
bear upon subjects which interest no one or on truths

32

WHAT IS WRITING?

so general that readers are convinced in advance. As for
their ideas, they must give them an air of profundity,
but with an effect of emptiness, and they must shape
them in such a way that they are obviously explained
by an unhappy childhood, a class hatred, or an incestuous
love. Let them not presume to think in earnest; thought
conceals the man, and it is the man alone who interests
us. A bare tear is not lovely. It offends. A good argu-
ment also offends, as Stendhal well observed. But an
argument that masks a tear that's what we're after.
The argument removes the obscenity from the tears; the
tears, by revealing their origin in the passions, remove
the aggressiveness from the argument. We shall be neither
too deeply touched nor at all convinced, and we shall
be able to yield ourselves in security to that moderate
pleasure which, as everyone knows, we derive from the
contemplation of works of art. Thus, this is "true, 55 "pure 55
literature, a subjectivity which yields itself under the
aspect of the objective, a discourse so curiously contrived
that it is equivalent to silence, a thought which debates
with itself, a reason which is only the mask of madness,
an Eternal which lets it be understood that it is only a
moment of History, a historical moment which, by the
hidden side which it reveals, suddenly sends back a per-
petual lesson to the eternal man, but which is produced
against the express wishes of those who do the teaching.
When all is said and done, the message is a soul which
is made object. A soul, and what is to be done with a
soul? One contemplates it at a respectful distance. It is
not customary to show one ? s soul in society without an
imperious motive. But, with certain reserves, convention

33

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

permits some individuate to put theirs into commerce,
and all adults may procure it for themselves. For many
people today, works of the mind are thus little straying
souls which one acquires at a modest price; there is good
old Montaigne's, dear La Fontaine's, and that of Jean-
Jacques and of Jean-Paul and of delicious Gerard. What
is called literary art is the ensemble of the treatments
which make them inoffensive. Tanned, refined, chem-
ically treated, they provide their acquirers with the op-
portunity of devoting some moments of a life completely
turned outward to the cultivation of subjectivity. Custom
guarantees it to be without risk. Montaigne's skepticism?
Who can take it seriously since the author of the Essays
got frightened when the plague ravaged Bordeaux? Or
Rousseau's humamtarianism, since "Jean-Jacques" put
his children into an orphanage? And the strange revela-
tions of Sylvie, since Gerard de Nerval was mad? At the
very most, the professional critic will set up infernal di-
alogues between them and will inform us that French
thought is a perpetual colloquy between Pascal and
Montaigne. In so doing he has no intention of making
Pascal and Montaigne more alive, but of making Mal-
raux and Gide more dead. Finally, when the internal
contradictions of tEe life and the work have made both of
them useless, when the message, in its imponderable
depth, has taught us these capital truths, "that man is
neither good nor bad," "that there is a great deal of suf-
fering in human life," "that genius is only great patience,"
this melancholy cuisine will have achieved its purpose,
and the reader, as he lays down the book, will be able to
cry out with a tranquil soul, "All this is only literature."

34

WHAT IS WRITING?

But since, for us, writing is an enterprise; since writers
are alive before being dead; since we think that we
must try to be as right as we can in our books; and since,
even if the centuries show us to be in the wrong, this is
no reason to show in advance that we are wrong; since
we think that the writer should engage himself com-
pletely in his works, and not as an abject passivity by put-
ting forward his vices, his misfortunes, and his weak-
nesses, but as a resolute will and as a choice, as this total
enterprise of living that each one of us is, it is then proper
that we take up this problem at its beginning and that
we, in our turn, ask ourselves: "Why does one write?"

NOTES

1. At least in general. The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to
make a painting both sign and object.

2. I say "create," not "imitate," which is enough to squelch the bombast
of M. Charles Estienne who has obviously not understood a word of my argu-
ment and who is dead set on tilting at shadows.

3. This is the example cited by Bataille in Inner Experience.

4. If one wishes to know the origin of this attitude toward language, the
following are a few brief indications.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.
In reality, the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the useful is, in
a sense, a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result which counts. When
I extend my hand in order to take up my pen, I have only a fleeting and ob-
scure consciousness of my gesture; it is the pen which I see. Thus, man is
alienated by his ends. Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things
become inessential, become a pretext for the act which becomes its own end.
The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it;
the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic com-
bat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act
of prowess or a dance. Nevertheless, however indifferent he might have been
to the success of the enterprise, the poet, before the nineteenth century, re-
mained in harmony with society as a whole. He did not use language for the
end which prose seeks, but he had the same confidence in it as the prose-writer.

With the coming of bourgeois society, the poet puts up a common front
with the prose-writer to declare it unlivable. His job is always to create the
myth of man, but he passes from white magic to black magic. Man is always

35

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

presented as the absolute end, but by the success of his enterprise he is
sucked into a utilitarian collectivity. The thing that is in the background of
his act and that will allow transition to the myth is thus no longer success, but
defeat. By stopping the infinite series of his projects like a screen, defeat alone
returns him to himself in his purity. The world remains the inessential, but
it is now there as a pretext for defeat. The finality of the thing is to send man
back to himself by blocking the route. Moreover, it is not a matter of arbi-
trarily introducing defeat and ruin into the course of the world, but rather
of having no eyes for anything but that. Human enterprise has two aspects: it
is both success and failure. The dialectical scheme is inadequate for reflecting
upon it. We must make our vocabulary and the frames of our reason more
supple. Some day I am going to try to describe that strange reality, History,
which is neither objective, nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is
contested, penetrated, and corroded by a kind of antidialectic, but which is
still a dialectic. But that is the philosopher's affair. One does not ordinarily
consider the two faces of Janus; the man of action sees one and the poet
sees the other. When the instruments are broken and unusable, when plans are
blasted and effort is useless, the world appears with a childlike and terrible
freshness, without supports, without paths. It has the maximum reality be-
cause it is crushing for man, and as action, in any case, generalizes, defeat
restores to things their individual reality. But, by an expected reversal, the
defeat, considered as a final end, is both a contesting and an appropriation of
this universe. A contesting, because man 5 worth more than that which
crushes; he no longer contests things in their "little bit of reality," like the
engineer or the captain, but, on the contrary, in their "too full of reality," by
his very existence as a vanquished person; he is the remorse of the world.
An appropriation, because the world, by ceasing to be the tool of success, be-
comes the instrument of failure. So there it is, traversed by an obscure final-
ity; it is its coefficient of adversity which serves, the more human insofar as it
is more hostile to man. The defeat itself turns into salvation. Not that it makes
us yield to some "beyond," but by itself it shifts and is metamorphosed. For
example, poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that the
word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by
itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a
receiver of the incommunicable. It is not that there is another thing to com-
municate; but the communication of prose having miscarried, it is the very
meaning of the word which becomes the pure incommunicable. Thus, the failure
of communication becomes a suggestion of the incommunicable, and the
thwarted project of utilizing words is succeeded by the pure disinterested in-
tuition of the word. Thus, we again meet with the description which we at-
tempted earlier in this study, but in the more general perspective of the ab-
solute valorization of the defeat, which seems to me the original attitude of
contemporary poetry. Note also that this choice confers upon the poet a very
precise function in the collectivity: in a highly integrated or religious society,
the defeat is masked by the State or redeemed by Religion; in a less inte-
grated and secular society, such as our democracies, it is up to poetry to re-
deem them.

36

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose,
even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. I repeat that I am talking
of contemporary poetry. History presents other forms of poetry. It is not my
concern to show their connection with ours. Thus, if one absolutely wishes to
speak of the engagement of the poet, let us say that he is the man who en-
gapes himself to lose. This is the deeper meaning of that tough-luck, of that
malediction with which he always claims kinship and which he always at-
tributes to an intervention from without; whereas it is his deepest choice, the
source, and not the consequence of his poetry. He is certain of the total de-
feat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to
bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general. Thus, he
contests, as we shall see, which is what the prose- writer does too. But the
contesting of prose is carried on in the name of a greater success; and that
of poetry, in the name of the hidden defeat which every victory conceals.

5. It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is,
of success, is present; and, vice-versa, the driest prose always contains a bit
of poetry, that is, a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable
of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each
phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more atten-
tion the word attracts; as Valery has shown, no one can understand a word to
its very bottom. Thus, each word is used simultaneously for its clear and social
meaning and for certain obscure resonances let me say, almost for its
physiognomy. The reader, too, is sensitive to this. At once we are no longer on
the level of concerted communication, but on that of grace and chance;
the silences of prose are poetic because they mark its limits, and it is for the
purpose of greater clarity that I have been considering the extreme cases of
pure prose and pure poetry. However, it need not be concluded that we can
pass from poetry to prose by a continuous series of intermediate forms. If the
prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of "prose" is shattered
and we fall into highfalutin nonsense. If the poet relates, explains, or teaches,
the poetry becomes prosaic; he has lost the game. It is a matter of complex
structures, impure, but well-defined.

37

II

WHY WRITE?

Each one has his reasons: for one, art is a flight; for
another, a means of conquering. But one can flee into a
hermitage, into madness, into death. One can conquer by
arms. Why does it have to be writing, why does one have
to manage his escapes and conquests by writing? Because,
behind the various aims of authors, there is a deeper
and more immediate choice which is common to all of
us. We shall try to elucidate this choice, and we shall see
whether it is not in the name of this very choice of writ-
ing that the engagement of writers must be required.

Each of our perceptions is accompanied by the con-
sciousness that human reality is a "revealer," that is, it
is through human reality that "there is" being, or, to put
it differently, that man is the means by which things are
manifested. It is our presence in the world which multi-
plies relations. It is we who set up a relationship between
this tree and that bit of sky. Thanks to us, that star which
has been dead for millennia, that quarter moon, and that
dark river are disclosed in the unity of a landscape. It is
the speed of our auto and our airplane which organizes
the great masses of the earth. With each of our acts, the

38

WHY WRITE?

world reveals to us a new face. But, if we know that we
are directors of being, we also know that we are not its
producers. If we turn away from this landscape, it will
sink back into its dark permanence. At least, it will sink
back; there is no one mad enough to think that it is going
to be annihilated. It is we who shall be annihilated, and
the earth will remain in its lethargy until another con-
sciousness comes along to awaken it. Thus, to our inner
certainty of being "revealers" is added that of being ines-
sential in relation to the thing revealed.

One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly
the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship
to the world. If I fix on canvas or in writing a certain
aspect of the fields or the sea or a look on someone's
face which I have disclosed, I am conscious of having pro-
duced them by condensing relationships, by introduc-
ing order where there was none, by imposing the unity
of mind on the diversity of things. That is, I feel myself
essential in relation to my creation. But this time it is
the created object which escapes me; I can not reveal
and produce at the same time. The creation becomes in-
essential in relation to the creative activity. First of all,
even if it appears to others as definitive, the created ob-
ject always seems to us in a state of suspension; we can
always change this line, that shade, that word. Thus, it
never forces itself. A novice painter asked his teacher,
"When should I consider my painting finished?" And
the teacher answered, "When you can look at it in
amazement and say to yourself Tm the one who did
that?"

Which amounts to saying "never." For it is virtually

39

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

:onsidering one's work with someone else's eyes and re-
pealing what one has created. But it is self-evident that
we are proportionally less conscious of the thing pro-
duced and more conscious of our productive activity.
When it is a matter of pottery or carpentry, we work
according to traditional norms, with tools whose usage
s codified; it is Heidegger's famous "they 55 who are
working with our hands. In this case, the result can seem
:o us sufficiently strange to preserve its objectivity in our
>yes. But if we ourselves produce the rules of production,
he measures, the criteria, and if our creative drive comes
rbm the very depths of our heart, then we never find
mything but ourselves in our work. It is we who have
nvented the laws by which we judge it. It is our history,
>ur love, our gaiety that we recognize in it. Even if we
hould regard it without touching it any further, we never
-eceive from it that gaiety or love. We put them into it.
The results which we have obtained on canvas or paper
lever seem to us objective. We are too familiar with the
>rocesses of which they are the effects. These processes
emain a subjective discovery; they are ourselves, our
nspiration, our ruse, and when we seek to perceive our
vork, we create it again, we repeat mentally the opera-
ions which produced it; each of its aspects appears as a
esult. Thus, in the perception, the object is given as the
essential thing and the subject as the inessential. The
atter seeks essentiality in the creation and obtains it,
>ut then it is the object which becomes the inessential.
This dialectic is nowhere more apparent than in the
irt of writing, for the literary object is a peculiar top
vhich exists only in movement. To make it come into

40

WHY WRITE?

view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it
lasts only as long as this act can last. Beyond that, there
are only black marks on paper. Now, the writer can not
read what he writes, whereas the shoemaker can put on
the shoes he has just made if they are his size, and the
architect can live in the house he has built. In reading,
one foresees; one waits. He foresees the end of the sen-
tence, the following sentence, the next page. He waits for
them to confirm or disappoint his foresights. The reading
is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by
awakenings, of hopes and deceptions. Readers are always
ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely proba-
ble future which partly collapses and partly comes to-
gether in proportion as they progress, which withdraws
from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon
of the literary object. Without waiting, without a future,
without ignorance, there is no objectivity.

Now the operation of writing involves an implicit
quasi-reading which makes real reading impossible.
When the words form under his pen, the author doubt-
less sees them, but he does not see them as the reader
does, since he knows them before writing them down.
The function of his gaze is not to reveal, by stroking them,
the sleeping words which are waiting to be read, but to
control the sketching of the signs. In short, it is a purely
regulating mission, and the view before him reveals noth-
ing except for slight slips of the pen. The writer neither
foresees nor conjectures; he projects. It often hap-
pens that he awaits, as they say, the inspiration. But
one does not wait for himself the way he waits for
others. If he hesitates, he knows that the future is not

41

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

made, that he himself is going to make it, and if he still
does not know what is going to happen to his hero, that
simply means that he has not thought about it, that he
has not decided upon anything. The future is then a blank
page, whereas the future of the reader is two hundred
pages filled with words which separate him from the end.
Thus, the writer meets everywhere only his knowledge,
his will, his plans, in short, himself. He touches only his
own subjectivity; the object he creates is out of reach;
he does not create it for himself. If he rereads himself, it
is already too late. The sentence will never quite be a
thing in his eyes. He goes to the very limits of the sub-
jective but without crossing it. He appreciates the effect
of a touch, of an epigram, of a well-placed adjective, but
it is the effect they will have on others. He can judge it,
not feel it. Proust never discovered the homosexuality
of Charlus, since he had decided upon it even before
starting on his book. And if a day comes when the book
takes on for its author a semblance of objectivity, it is
that years have passed, that he has forgotten it, that its
spirit is quite foreign to him, and doubtless he is no longer
capable of writing it. This was the case with Rousseau
when he reread the Social Contract at the end of his life.
Thus, it is not true that one writes for himself. That
would be the worst blow. In projecting his emotions on
paper, one barely manages to give them a languishing
extension. The creative act is only an incomplete and
abstract moment in the production of a work. If the
author existed alone he would be able to write as much
as he liked; the work as object would never see the light
of day and he would either have to put down his pen or

42

WHY WRITE?

despair. But the operation of writing implies that of
reading as its dialectical correlative and these two con-
nected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the con-
joint effort of author and reader which brings upon
the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is
the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by
others.

Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of percep-
tion and creation. 1 It supposes the essentiality of both
the subject and the object. The object is essential because
it is strictly transcendent, because it imposes its own
structures, and because one must wait for it and observe
it; but the subject is also essential because it is required
not only to disclose the object (that is, to make there be
an object) but also so that this object might be (that is,
to produce it). In a word, the reader is conscious of dis-
closing in creating, of creating by disclosing. In reality,
it is not necessary to believe that reading is a mechanical
operation and that signs make an impression upon him as
light does on a photographic plate. If he is inattentive,
tired, stupid, or thoughtless, most of the relations will es-
cape him. He will never manage to "catch on 55 to the
object (in the sense in which we see that fire "catches"
or "doesn't catch"). He will draw some phrases out of
the shadow, but they will seem to appear as random
strokes. If he is at his best, he will project beyond the
words a synthetic form, each phrase of which will be no
more than a partial function: the "theme, 55 the "subject, 55
or the "meaning. 55 Thus, from the very beginning, the

1. The same is true in different degrees regarding the spectator's attitude
before other works of art (paintings, symphonies, statues, etc.)

43

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

meaning is no longer contained in the words, since it is
he, on the contrary, who allows the signification of each
of them to be understood; and the literary object, though
realized through language, is never given in language.
On the contrary, it is by nature a silence and an op-
ponent of the word. In addition, the hundred thousand
words aligned in a book can be read one by one so that
the meaning of the work does not emerge. Nothing is ac-
complished if the reader does not put himself from the
very beginning and almost without a guide at the height
of this silence; if, in short, he does not invent it and
does not then place there, and hold on to, the words and
sentences which he awakens. And if I am told that it
would be more fitting to call this operation a re-invention
or a discovery, I shall answer that, first, such a re-inven-
tion would be as new and as original an act as the first
invention. And, especially, when an object has never
existed before, there can be no question of re-inventing it
or discovering it. For if the silence about which I am
speaking is really the goal at which the author is aiming,
he has, at least, never been familiar with it; his silence
is subjective and anterior to language. It is the absence
of words, the undiff erentiated and lived silence of inspira-
tion, which the word will then particularize, whereas the
silence produced by the reader is an object. And at the
very interior of this object there are more silences
which the author does not tell. It is a question of silences
which are so particular that they could not retain any
meaning outside of the object which the reading causes
to appear. However, it is these which give it its density
and its particular face.

44

WHY WRITE?

To say that they are unexpressed is hardly the word;
for they are precisely the inexpressible. And that is why
one does not come upon them at any definite moment
in the reading; they are everywhere and nowhere. The
quality of the marvelous in The Wanderer (Le Grand
Meaulnes], the grandiosity of Armance, the degree of
realism and truth of Kafka's mythology, these are never
given. The reader must invent them all in a continual
exceeding of the written thing. To be sure, the author
guides him, but all he does is guide him. The landmarks
he sets up are separated by the void. The reader must
unite them; he must go beyond them. In short, reading
is directed creation.

On the one hand, the literary object has no other
substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's
waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this
impatience of the reader he would remain only a collec-
tion of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who
questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and
wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate
himself would not exist without the hatred I have for
him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is
his very flesh.

But on the other hand, the words are there like traps
to arouse our feelings and to reflect them toward us.
Each word is a path of transcendence; it shapes our
feelings, names them, and attributes them to an imagi-
nary personage who takes it upon himself to live them for
us and who has no other substance than these borrowed
passions; he confers objects, perspectives, and a horizon
upon them.

45

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Thus, for the reader, all is to do and all is already
done; the work exists only at the exact level of his capac-
ities; while he reads and creates, he knows that he can
always go further in his reading, can always create more
profoundly, and thus the work seems to him as inexhaust-
ible and opaque as things. We would readily reconcile
that "rational intuition" which Kant reserved to divine
Reason with this absolute production of qualities, which,
to the extent that they emanate from our subjectivity,
congeal before our eyes into impermeable objectivities.

Since the creation can find its fulfillment only in read-
ing, since the artist must entrust to another the job of
carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through
the consciousness of the reader that he can regard him-
self as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal.
To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead
into objective existence the revelation which I have
undertaken by means of language. And if it should be
asked to what the writer is appealing, the answer is
simple. As the sufficient reason for the appearance of the
aesthetic object is never found either in the book (where
we find merely solicitations to produce the object) or
in the author's mind, .and as his subjectivity, which he
cannot get away from, cannot give a reason for the act
of leading into objectivity, the appearance of the work
of art is a new event which cannot be explained by an-
terior data. And since this directed creation is an absolute
beginning, it is therefore brought about by the freedom of
the reader, and by what is purest in that freedom. Thus,
the writer appeals to the reader's freedom to collaborate
in the production of his work.

46

WHY WRITE?

It will doubtless be said that all tools address them-
selves to our freedom since they are the instruments of
a possible action, and that the work of art is not unique
in that. And it is true that the tool is the congealed out-
line of an operation. But it remains on the level of the
hypothetical imperative. I may use a hammer to nail
up a case or to hit my neighbor over the head. Insofar
as I consider it in itself, it is not an appeal to my freedom;
it does not put me face to face with it; rather, it aims
at using it by substituting a set succession of traditional
procedures for the free invention of means. The book
does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one
cannot address himself to freedom as such by means of
constraint, fascination, or entreaties. There is only one
way of attaining it; first, by recognizing it, then, having
confidence in it, and finally, requiring of it an act, an act
in its own name, that is, in the name of the confidence
that one brings to it.

Thus, the book is not, like the tool, a means for any
end whatever; the end to which it offers itself is the
reader's freedom. And the Kantian expression "finality
without end 53 seems to me quite inappropriate for desig-
nating the work of art. In fact, it implies that the aes-
thetic object presents only the appearance of a finality and
is limited to soliciting the free and ordered play of the
imagination. It forgets that the imagination of the spec-
tator has not only a regulating function, but a constitutive
one. It does not play; it is called upon to recompose the
beautiful object beyond the traces left by the artist. The
imagination can not revel in itself any more than can the

47

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

other functions of the mind; it is always on the outside,
always engaged in an enterprise. There would be finality
without end if some object offered such a set ordering
that it would lead us to suppose that it has one even
though we can not ascribe one to it. By defining the beau-
tiful in this way one can and this is Kant's aim
liken the beauty of art to natural beauty, since a flower,
for example, presents so much symmetry, such harmonious
colors, and such regular curves, that one is immediately
tempted to seek a finalist explanation for all these prop-
erties and to see them as just so many means at the dis-
posal of an unknown end. But that is exactly the error.
The beauty of nature is in no way comparable to that
of art. The work of art does not have an end; there we
agree with Kant. But the reason is that it is an end. The
Kantian formula does not account for the appeal which
resounds at the basis of each painting, each statue, each
book. Kant believes that the work of art first exists as
fact and that it is then seen. Whereas, it exists only if one
looks at it and if it is first pure appeal, pure exigence to
exist. It is not an instrument whose existence is manifest
and whose end is undetermined. It presents itself as a
task to be discharged;* from the very beginning it places
itself on the level of the categorical imperative. You are
perfectly free to leave that book on the table. But if you
open it, you assume responsibility for it. For freedom is
not experienced by its enjoying its free subjective func-
tioning, but in a creative act required by an imperative.
This absolute end, this imperative which is transcendent
yet acquiesced in, which freedom itself adopts as its own,

48

WHY WRITE?

is what we call a value. The work of art is a value be-
cause it is an appeal.

If I appeal to my readers so that we may carry the
enterprise which I have begun to a successful conclusion,
it is self-evident that I consider him as a pure freedom,
as an unconditioned activity; thus, in no case can I ad-
dress myself to his passivity, that is, try to affect him, to
communicate to him, from the very first, emotions of
fear, desire, or anger. There are, doubtless, authors who
concern themselves solely with arousing these emotions
because they are foreseeable, manageable, and because
they have at their disposal sure-fire means for provoking
them. But it is also true that they are reproached for this
kind of thing, as Euripides has been since antiquity be-
cause he had children appear on the stage. Freedom is
alienated in the state of passion; it is abruptly engaged
in partial enterprises; it loses sight of its task which is to
produce an absolute end. And the book is no longer any-
ihing but a means for feeding hate or desire. The writer
should not seek to overwhelm; otherwise he is in contra-
diction with himself; if he wishes to make demands he
must propose only the task to be fulfilled. Hence, the char-
acter of pure presentation which appears essential to the
work of art. The reader must be able to make a certain
aesthetic withdrawal. This is what Gautier foolishly con-
fused with u art for art's sake" and the Parnassians with
the imperturbability of the artist. It is simply a matter
of precaution, and Genet more justly calls it the author's
politeness toward the reader. But that does not mean
that the writer makes an appeal to some sort of abstract
and conceptual freedom. One certainly creates the aes-

49

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

thetic object with feelings; if it is touching, it appears
through our tears; if it is comic, it will be recognized
by laughter. However, these feelings are of a particular
kind. They have their origin in freedom; they are loaned.
The belief which I accord the tale is freely assented to.
It is a Passion, in the Christian sense of the word, that
is, a freedom which resolutely puts itself into a state of
passivity to obtain a certain transcendent effect by this
sacrifice. The reader renders himself credulous; he de-
scends into credulity which, though it ends by enclosing
him like a dream, is at every moment conscious of being
free. An effort is sometimes made to force the writer into
this dilemma: "Either one believes in your story, and it
is intolerable, or one does not believe in it, and it is ri-
diculous. 55 But the argument is absurd because the
characteristic of aesthetic consciousness is to be a belief
by means of engagement, by oath, a belief sustained by
fidelity to one's self and to the author, a perpetually
renewed choice to believe. I can awaken at every mo-
ment, and I know it; but I do not want to; reading is a
free dream. So that all feelings which are exacted on the
basis of this imaginary belief are like particular modula-
tions of my freedom. Far from absorbing or masking it,
they are so many different ways it has chosen to reveal
itself to itself. Raskolnikov, as I have said, would only
be a shadow, without the mixture of repulsion and friend-
ship which I feel for him and which makes him live.
But, by a reversal which is the characteristic of the im-
aginary object, it is not his behavior which excites my
indignation or esteem, but my indignation and esteem
which give consistency and objectivity to his behavior.

50

WHY WRITE?

Thus, the reader's feelings are never dominated by the
object, and as no external reality can condition them,
they have their permanent source in freedom; that is,
they are all generous for I call a feeling generous which
has its origin and its end in freedom. Thus, reading is an
exercise in generosity, and what the writer requires of
the reader is not the application of an abstract freedom
but the gift of his whole person, with his passions, his
prepossessions, his sympathies, his sexual temperament,
and his scale of values. Only this person will give himself
generously; freedom goes through and through him and
comes to transform the darkest masses of his sensibility.
And as activity has rendered itself passive in order for it
better to create the object, vice-versa, passivity becomes
an act; the man who is reading has raised himself to the
highest degree. That is why we see people who are known
for their toughness shed tears at the recital of imaginary
misfortunes; for the moment they have become what
they would have been if they had not spent their lives
hiding their freedom from themselves.

Thus, the author writes in order to address himself to
the freedom of readers, and he requires it in order to
make his work exist. But he does not stop there; he also
requires that they return this confidence which he has
given them, that they recognize his creative freedom,
and that they in turn solicit it by a symmetrical and
inverse appeal. Here there appears the other dialectical
paradox of reading; the more we experience our freedom,
the more we recognize that of the other; the more he
demands of us, the more we demand of him.

When I am enchanted with a landscape, I know very

51

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

well that it is not I who create it, but I also know that
without me the relations which are established before
my eyes among the trees, the foliage, the earth, and the
grass would not exist at all. I know that I can give no rea-
son for the appearance of finality which I discover in
the assortment of hues and in the harmony of the forms
and movements created by the wind. Yet, it exists; there
it is before my eyes, and I can make there be being only
if being already is. But even if I believe in God, I can
not establish any passage, unless it be purely verbal, be-
tween the divine, universal solicitude and the particular
spectacle which I am considering. To say that He made
the landscape in order to charm me or that He made me
the kind of person who is pleased by it is to take a ques-
tion for an answer. Is the marriage of this blue and that
green deliberate? How can I know? The idea of a univer-
sal providence is no guarantee of any particular intention,
especially in the case under consideration, since the green
of the grass is explained by biological laws, specific con-
stants, and geographical determinism, while the reason
for the blue of the water is accounted for by the depth
of the river, the nature of the soil and the swiftness of
the current. The assorting of the shades, if it is willed,
can only be something thrown into the bargain; it is the
meeting of two causal series, that is to say, at first sight,
a fact of chance. At best, the finality remains problem-
atic. All the relations we establish remain hypotheses; no
end is proposed to us in the manner of an imperative,
since none is expressly revealed as having been willed by
a creator. Thus, our freedom is never called forth by
natural beauty. Or rather, there is an appearance of

52

WH Y WRITE?

order in the ensemble of the foliage, the forms, and the
movements, hence, the illusion of a calling forth which
seems to solicit this freedom and which disappears im-
mediately when one regards it. Hardly have we be-
gun to run our eyes over this arrangement, than the
call disappears; we remain alone, free to tie up one
color with another or with a third, to set up a relation-
ship between the tree and the water or the tree and the
sky, or the tree, the water and the sky. My freedom be-
comes caprice. To the extent that I establish new relation-
ships, I remove myself further from the illusory ob-
jectivity which solicits me. I muse about certain motifs
which are vaguely outlined by the things; the natural
reality is no longer anything but a pretext for musing.
Or, in that case, because I have deeply regretted that this
arrangement which was momentarily perceived was not
offered to me by somebody and consequently is not real,
the result is that I fix my dream, that I transpose it to
canvas or in writing. Thus, I interpose myself between
the finality without end which appears in the natural
spectacles and the gaze of other men. I transmit it to
them. It becomes human by this transmission. Art here
is a ceremony of the gift and the gift alone brings about
the metamorphosis. It is something like the transmission
of titles and powers in the matriarchate where the mother
does not possess the names, but is the indispensable inter-
mediary between uncle and nephew. Since I have cap-
tured this illusion in flight, since I lay it out for other
men and have disengaged it and rethought it for them,
they can consider it with confidence. It has become in-
tentional. As for me, I remain, to be sure, at the border

53

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

of the subjective and the objective without ever being
able to contemplate the objective ordonnance which I
transmit.

The reader, on the contrary, progresses in security.
However far he may go, the author has gone farther.
Whatever connections he may establish among the dif-
ferent parts of the book among the chapters or the
words he has a guarantee, namely, that they have been
expressly willed. As Descartes says, he can even pretend
that there is a secret order among parts which seem to
have no connection. The creator has preceded him along
the way, and the most beautiful disorders are effects of
art, that is, again order. Reading is induction, interpola-
tion, extrapolation, and the basis of these activities rests
on the reader's will, as for a long time it was believed that
that of scientific induction rested on the divine will. A
gentle force accompanies us and supports us from the first
page to the last. That does not mean that we fathom the
artist's intentions easily. They constitute, as we have said,
the object of conjectures, and there is an experience of the
reader; but these conjuctures are supported by the great
certainty we have that the beauties which appear in the
book are never accidental. In nature, the tree and the
sky harmonize only by chance; if, on the contrary, in the
novel, the protagonists find themselves in a certain tower,
in a certain prison, if they stroll in a certain garden, it is
a matter both of the restitution of independent causal
series (the character had a certain state of mind which
was due to a succession of psychological and social events;
on the other hand, he betook himself to a determined
place and the layout of the city required him to

54

WHY WRITE?

cross a certain park) and of the expression of a deeper
finality, for the park came into existence only in order to
harmonize with a certain state of mind, to express it
by means of things or to put it into relief by a vivid con-
trast, and the state of mind itself was conceived in con-
nection with the landscape. Here it is causality which is
appearance and which might be called "causality with-
out cause," and it is the finality which is the profound
reality. But if I can thus in all confidence put the order
of ends under the order of causes, it is because by open-
ing the book I am asserting that the object has its source
in human freedom.

If I were to suspect the artist of having written out of
passion and in passion, my confidence would immediately
vanish, for it would serve no purpose to have supported
the order of causes by the order of ends. The latter would
be supported in its turn by a psychic causality and the
work of art would end by re-entering the chain of deter-
minism. Certainly I do not deny when I am reading that
the author may be impassioned, nor even that he might
have conceived the first plan of his work under the sway
of passion. But his decision to write supposes that he with-
draws somewhat from his feelings, in short, that he has
transformed his emotions into free emotions as I do mine
while reading him; that is, that he is in an attitude of
generosity.

Thus, reading is a pact of generosity between author
and reader. Each one trusts the other; each one counts
on the other, demands of the other as much as he de-
mands of himself. For this confidence is itself generosity.
Nothing can force the author to believe that his reader

55

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

will use his freedom; nothing can force the reader to be-
lieve that the author has used his. Both of them make
a free decision. There is then established a dialectical go-
ing- and-coming; when I read, I make demands; if my
demands are met, what I am then reading provokes me
to demand more of the author, which means to demand
of the author that he demand more of me. And, vice-
versa, the author's demand is that I carry my demands to
the highest pitch. Thus, my freedom, by revealing itself,
reveals the freedom of the other.

It matters little whether the aesthetic object is the
product of "realistic" art (or supposedly such) or "for-
mal" art. At any rate, the natural relations are inverted;
that tree on the first plane of the Cezanne painting first
appears as the product of a causal chain. But the causality
is an illusion; it will doubtless remain as a proposition as
long as we look at the painting, but it will be supported
by a deep finality; if the tree is placed in such a way, it
is because the rest of the painting requires that this form
and those colors be placed on the first plane. Thus,
through the phenomenal causality, our gaze attains fi-
nality as the deep structure of the object, and, beyond
finality, it attains human freedom as its source and orig-
inal basis. Verrneer's realism is carried so far that at
first it might be thought to be photographic. But if one
considers the splendor of his texture, the pink and velvety
glory of his little brick walls, the blue thickness of a
branch of woodbine, the glazed darkness of his vestibules,
the orange-colored flesh of his faces which are as polished
as the stone of holy-water basins, one suddenly feels, in
the pleasure that he experiences, that the finality is not

56

WHY WRITE?

so much in the forms or colors as in his material imagi-
nation. It is the very substance and temper of the things
which here give the forms their reason for being. With
this realist we are perhaps closest to absolute creation,
since it is in the very passivity of the matter that we
meet the unfathomable freedom of man.

The work is never limited to the painted, sculpted,
or narrated object. Just as one perceives things only
against the background of the world, so the objects rep-
resented by art appear against the background of the
universe. On the background of the adventures of Fa-
brice are the Italy of 1820, Austria, France, the sky and
stars which the Abbe Blanis consults, and finally the
whole earth. If the painter presents us with a field or a
vase of flowers, his paintings are windows which are open
on the whole world. We follow the red path which is
buried among the wheat much farther than Van Gogh
has painted it, among other wheat fields, under other
clouds, to the river which empties into the sea, and we
extend to infinity, to the other end of the world, the deep
finality which supports the existence of the field and
the earth. So that, through the various objects which it
produces or reproduces, the creative act aims at a total
renewal of the world. Each painting, each book, is a re-
covery of the totality of being. Each of them presents
this totality to the freedom of the spectator. For this is
quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving
it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human
freedom. But, since what the author creates takes on ob-
jective reality only in the eyes of the spectator, this re-
covery is consecrated by the ceremony of the spectacle

57

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

and particularly of reading. We are already in a better
position to answer the question we raised a while ago:
the writer chooses to appeal to the freedom of other men
so that, by the reciprocal implications of their demands,
they may re-adapt the totality of being to man and may
again enclose the universe within man.

If we wish to go still further, we must bear in mind that
the writer, like all other artists, aims at giving his reader
a certain feeling that is customarily called aesthetic
pleasure, and which I would very much rather call aes-
thetic joy, and that this feeling, when it appears, is a
sign that the work is achieved. It is therefore fitting to
examine it in the light of the preceding considerations.
In effect, this joy, which is denied to the creator, insofar
as he creates, becomes one with the aesthetic conscious-
ness of the spectator, that is, in the case under conside-
ration, of the reader. It is a complex feeling but one
whose structures and condition are inseparable from one
another. It is identical, at first, with the recognition of
a transcendent and absolute end which, for a moment,
suspends the utilitarian round of ends-means and means-
ends 1 , that is, of an appeal or, what amounts to the
same thing, of a value. And the positional consciousness
which I take of this value is necessarily accompanied by
the non-positional consciousness of my freedom, since
my freedom is manifested to itself by a transcendent ex-
igency. The recognition of freedom by itself is joy, but
this structure of non-thetical consciousness implies an-
other: since, in effect, reading is creation, my freedom

1. In practical life a means may be taken for an end as soon as one searches
for it, and each end is revealed as a means of attaining another end.

58

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

does not only appear to itself as pure autonomy but as
creative activity, that is, it is not limited to giving itself
its own law but perceives itself as being constitutive of
the object. It is on this level that the phenomenon specifi-
cally is manifested, that is, a creation wherein the
created object is given as object to its creator. It is the
sole case in which the creator gets any enjoyment out of
the object he creates. And the word enjoyment which is
applied to the positional consciousness of the work read
indicates sufficiently that we are in the presence of an
essential structure of aesthetic joy. This positional en-
joyment is accompanied by the non-positional conscious-
ness of being essential in relation to an object perceived as
essential. I shall call this aspect of aesthetic conscious-
ness the feeling of security; it is this which stamps the
strongest aesthetic emotions with a sovereign calm. It has
its origin in the authentication of a strict harmony be-
tween subjectivity and objectivity. As, on the other hand,
the aesthetic object is properly the world insofar as it is
aimed at through the imaginary, aesthetic joy accom-
panies the positional consciousness that the world is a
value, that is, a task proposed to human freedom. I shall
call this the aesthetic modification of the human project,
for, as usual, the world appears as the horizon of our
situation, as the infinite distance which separates us
from ourselves, as the synthetic totality of the given, as
the undifferentiated ensemble of obstacles and imple-
ments but never as a demand addressed to our free-
dom. Thus, aesthetic joy proceeds to this level of the
consciousness which I take of recovering and internal-
izing that which is non-ego par excellence, since I trans-

59

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

form the given into an imperative and the fact into a va-
lue. The world is my task, that is, the essential and freely
accepted function of my freedom is to make that unique
and absolute object which is the universe come into being
in an unconditioned movement. And, thirdly, the pre-
ceding structures imply a pact between human free-
doms, for, on the one hand, reading is a confident and
exacting recognition of the freedom of the writer, and,
on the other hand, aesthetic pleasure, as it is itself ex-
perienced in the form of a value, involves an absolute
exigence in regard to others; every man, insofar as he is
a freedom, feels the same pleasure in reading the same
work. Thus, all mankind is present in its highest freedom;
it sustains the being of a world which is both its world
and the "external" world. In aesthetic joy the positional
consciousness is an image-making consciousness of the
world in its totality both as being and having to be, both
as totally ours and totally foreign, and the more ours as
it is the more foreign. The non-positional consciousness
really envelops the harmonious totality of human free-
doms insofar as it makes the object of a universal confi-
dence and exigency.

To write is thus both to disclose the world and to of-
fer it as a task to the generosity of the reader. It is to
have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to
make one's self be recognized as essential to the totality
of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means
of interposed persons; but, on the other hand, as the real
world is revealed only by action, as one can feel himself
in it only by exceeding it in order to change it, the novel-
ist's universe would lack thickness if it were not dis-

60

WHY WRITE?

covered in a movement to transcend it. It has often been
observed that an object in a story does not derive its
density of existence from the number and length of the
descriptions devoted to it, but from the complexity of
its connections with the different characters. The more
often the characters handle it, take it up, and put it
down, in short, go beyond it toward their own ends, the
more real will it appear. Thus, of the world of the novel,
that is, the totality of men and things, we may say that
in order for it to offer its maximum density the disclosure-
creation by which the reader discovers it must also be
an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words,
the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it
will be. The error of realism has been to believe that the
real reveals itself to contemplation, and that consequently
one could draw an impartial picture of it. How could
that be possible, since the very perception is partial, since
by itself the naming is already a modification of the ob-
ject? And how could the writer, who wants himself to
be essential to this universe, want to be essential to the
injustice which this universe comprehends? Yet, he must
be; but if he accepts being the creator of injustices, it
is in a movement which goes beyond them toward their
abolition. As for me who read, if I create and keep alive
an unjust world, I can not help making myself responsi-
ble for it. And the author's whole art is bent on
obliging me to create what he discloses, therefore to com-
promise myself. So both of us bear the responsibility for
the universe. And precisely because this universe is sup-
ported by the joint effort of our two freedoms, and
because the author, with me as medium, has attempted

61

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

to integrate it into the human, it must appear truly in
itself, in its very marrow, as being shot through and
through with a freedom which has taken human freedom
as its end, and if it is not really the city of ends that it
ought to be, it must at least be a stage along the way;
in a word, it must be a becoming and it must always be
considered and presented not as a crushing mass which
weighs us down, but from the point of view of its going
beyond toward that city of ends. However bad and hope-
less the humanity which it paints may be, the work must
have an air of generosity. Not, of course, that this gen-
erosity is to be expressed by means of edifying discourses
and virtuous characters; it must not even be premed-
itated, and it is quite true that fine sentiments do not
make fine books. But it must be the very warp and woof
of the book, the stuff out of which the people and things
are cut; whatever the subject, a sort of essential lightness
must appear everywhere and remind us that the work
is never a natural datum, but an exigence and a gift. And
if I am given this world with its injustices, it is not so that
I might contemplate them coldly, but that I might ani-
mate them with my indignation, that I might disclose
them and create them with their nature as injustices, that
is, as abuses to be suppressed. Thus, the writer's universe
will only reveal itself in all its depth to the examination,
the admiration, and the indignation of the reader; and
the generous love is a promise to maintain, and the gen-
erous indignation is a promise to change, and the admi-
ration a promise to imitate; although literature is one
thing and morality a quite different one, at the heart
of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imper-

62

WHY WRITE?

ative. For, since the one who writes recognizes, by the
very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom
of his readers, and since the one who reads, by the mere
fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of
the writer, the work of art, from whichever side you ap-
proach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men.
And since readers, like the author, recognize this free-
dom only to demand that it manifest itself, the work can
be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world
insofar as it demands human freedom. The result of
which is that there is no "gloomy literature", since, how-
ever dark may be the colors in which one paints the world,
he paints it only so that free men may feel their freedom
as they face it. Thus, there are only good and bad novels.
The bad novel aims to please by flattering, whereas the
good one is an exigence and an act of faith. But above
all, the unique point of view from which the author can
present the world to those freedoms whose concurrence
he wishes to bring about is that of a world to be impreg-
nated always with more freedom. It would be inconceiv-
able that this unleashing of generosity provoked by the
writer could be used to authorize an injustice, and that
the reader could enjoy his freedom while reading a work
which approves or accepts or simply abstains from con-
demning the subjection of man by man. One can imagine
a good novel being written by an American Negro even
if hatred of the whites were spread all over it, because
it is the freedom of his race that he demands through
this hatred. And, as he invites me to assume the attitude
of generosity, the moment I feel myself a pure freedom
I can not bear to identify myself with a race of op-

63

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

pressors. Thus, I require of all freedoms that they de-
mand the liberation of colored people against the white
race and against myself insofar as I am a part of it, but
nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to
write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism. 1 For, the
moment I feel that my freedom is indissolubly linked
with that of all other men, it can not be demanded of me
that I use it to approve the enslavement of a part of
these men. Thus, whether he is an essayist, a pamph-
leteer, a satirist, or a novelist, whether he speaks only of
individual passions or whether he attacks the social order,
the writer, a free man addressing free men, has only one
subject freedom.

Hence, any attempt to enslave his readers threatens
him in his very art. A blacksmith can be affected by
fascism in his life as a man, but not necessarily in his
craft; a writer will be affected in both, and even more
in his craft than in his life. I have seen writers, who be-
fore the war, called for fascism with all their hearts, smit-
ten with sterility at the very moment when the Nazis
were loading them with honors. I am thinking of Drieu
la Rochelle in particular; he was mistaken, but he was
sincere. He proved it. He had agreed to direct a Nazi-
inspired review. The* first few months he reprimanded,
rebuked, and lectured his countrymen. No one answered

1. This last remark may arouse some readers. If so, I'd like to know a single
good novel whose express purpose was to serve oppression, a single good novel
which has been written against Jews, negroes, workers, or colonial people.
"But if there isn't any, that's no reason why someone may not write one some
day." But you then admit that you are an abstract theoretician. You, not I.
For it is in the name of your abstract conception of art that you assert the
possibility of a fact which has never come into being, whereas I limit myself
to proposing an explanation for a recognized fact.

64

wm WRITE?

him because no one was free to do so. He became irrita-
ted; he no longer felt his readers. He became more in-
sistent, but no sign appeared to prove that he had been
understood. No sign of hatred, nor of anger either; noth-
ing. He seemed disoriented, the victim of a growing dis-
tress. He complained bitterly to the Germans. His articles
had been superb: they became shrill. The moment arrived
when he struck his breast; no echo, except among the
bought journalists whom he despised. He handed in his
resignation, withdrew it, again spoke, still in the desert.
Finally, he kept still, gagged by the silence of others. He
had demanded the enslavement of others, but in his crazy
mind he must have imagined that it was voluntary, that
it was still free. It came; the man in him congratulated
himself mightily, but the writer could not bear it. While
this was going on, others, who, happily, were in the
majority, understood that the freedom of writing implies
the freedom of the citizen. One does not write for slaves.
The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in
which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is
threatened, the other is too. And it is not enough to defend
them with the pen. A day comes when the pen is forced
to stop, and the writer must then take up arms. Thus,
however you might have come to it, whatever the opin-
ions you might have professed, literature throws you
into battle. Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom;
once you have begun, you are engaged, willy-nilly.

Engaged in what? Defending freedom? That's easy
to say. Is it a matter of acting as guardian of ideal values
like Benda's clerk before the betrayal, 1 or is it concrete,

1. The reference here is to Benda's La Trahison d6s clercs, translated into
English as The Treason of the Intellectuals. Translator's note.

65

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

everyday freedom which must be protected by our tak-
ing sides in political and social struggles? The question
is tied up with another one, one very simple in appear-
ance but which nobody ever asks himself: "For whom
does one write? 55

66

Ill

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

At first sight, there doesn't seem to be any doubt:
one writes for the universal reader, and we have seen,
in effect, that the exigency of the writer is, as a rule,
addressed to all men. But the preceding descriptions
are ideal. As a matter of fact the writer knows that he
speaks for freedoms which are swallowed up, masked,
and unavailable; and his own freedom is not so pure;
he has to clean it. It is dangerously easy to speak too
readily about eternal values; eternal values are very, very
fleshless. Even freedom, if one considers it sub specie
aeternitatis, seems to be a withered branch; for, like the
sea, there is no end to it. It is nothing else but the move-
ment by which one perpetually uproots and liberates
himself. There is no given freedom. One must win an in-
ner victory over his passions, his race, his class, and his
nation and must conquer other men along with himself.
But what counts in this case is the particular form of the
obstacle to surmount, of the resistance to overcome. That
is what gives form to freedom in each circumstance. If
the writer has chosen, as Benda has it, to talk drivel,
he can speak in fine, rolling periods of that eternal free-
dom which National Socialism, Stalinist communism,

67

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

and the capitalist democracies all lay claim to. He won't
disturb anybody; he won't address anybody. Everything
he asks for is granted him in advance. But it is an abstract
dream. Whether he wants to or not, and even if he has
his eyes on eternal laurels, the writer is speaking to his
contemporaries and brothers of his class and race.

As a matter of fact, it has not been sufficiently ob-
served that a work of the mind is by nature allusive. Even
if the author's aim is to give the fullest possible repre-
sentation of his object, there is never any question as
to whether he is telling everything. He knows far more
than he tells. This is so because language is elliptical. If I
want to let my neighbor know that a wasp has gotten in by
the window, there is no need for a long speech, "Watch
out!' 5 or "Hey!" a word is enough, a gesture as soon
as he sees it, everything is clear. Imagine a phonograph
record reproducing for us, without comment, the every-
day conversations of a household in Provins or An-
gouleme we wouldn't understand a thing; the context
would be lacking, that is, memories and perceptions in
common, the situation and the enterprises of the couple;
in short, the world such as each of the speakers knows it
to appear to the other.

The same with reading: people of a same period and
collectivity, who have lived through the same events, who
have raised or avoided the same questions, have the same
taste in their mouth; they have the same complicity, and
there are the same corpses among them. That is why it
is not necessary to write so much; there are key- words.
If I were to tell an audience of Americans about the Ger-
man occupation, there would have to be a great deal of

68

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

analysis and precaution. I would waste twenty pages in
dispelling preconceptions, prejudices, and legends. After-
ward, I would have to be sure of my position at every
step; I would have to look for images and symbols in
American history which would enable them to understand
ours; I would always have to keep in mind the difference
between our old man's pessimism and their childlike op-
timism. If I were to write about the same subject for
Frenchmen, we are "entre nous." For example, it would
be enough to say: "A concert of German military music
in the band-stand of a public garden;' 3 everything is there;
a raw spring day, a park in the provinces, men with shaven
skulls blowing away at their brasses, blind and deaf pass-
ers-by who quicken their steps, two or three sullen-looking
listeners under the trees, this useless serenade to France
which drifts off into the sky, our shame and our anguish,
our anger, and our pride too. Thus, the reader I am
addressing is neither Micromegas nor L'Ingenu; nor is
he God the Father either. He has not the ignorance of
the noble savage to whom everything has to be explained
on the basis of principles; he is not a spirit or a tabula
rasa. Neither has he the omniscience of an angel or of
the Eternal Father. I reveal certain aspects of the uni-
verse to him; I take advantage of what he knows to at-
tempt to teach him what he does not know. Suspended
between total ignorance and all-knowingness, he has a
definite stock of knowledge which varies from moment
to moment and which is enough to reveal his historicity.
In actual fact, he is not an instantaneous consciousness,
a pure timeless affirmation of freedom, nor does he soar
above history; he is involved in it.

69

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Authors too are historical. And that is precisely the
reason why some of them want to escape from history by
a leap into eternity. The book, serving as a go-between,
establishes a historical contact among the men who are
steeped in the same history and who likewise contribute
to its making. Writing and reading are two facets of the
same historical fact, and the freedom to which the writer
invites us is not a pure abstract consciousness of being
free. Strictly speaking, it is not; it wins itself in a
historical situation; each book proposes a concrete lib-
eration on the basis of a particular alienation. Hence, in
each one there is an implicit recourse to institutions,
customs, certain forms of oppression and conflict, to the
wisdom and the folly of the day, to lasting passions and
passing stubbornness, to superstitions and recent victories
of common sense, to evidence and ignorance, to particu-
lar modes of reasoning which the sciences have made
fashionable and which are applied in all domains, to
hopes, to fears, to habits of sensibility, imagination, and
even perception, and finally, to customs and values which
have been handed down, to a whole world which the
author and the reader have in common. It is this familiar
world which the writer animates and penetrates with his
freedom. It is on the basis of this world that the reader
must bring about his concrete liberation; it is alienation,
situation, and history. It is this world which I must change
or preserve for myself and others. For if the immediate
aspect of freedom is negativity, we know that it is not a
matter of the abstract power of saying no, but of a con-
crete negativity which retains within itself (and is com-
pletely colored by) what it denies. And since the freedoms

70

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

of the author and reader seek and affect each other
through a world, it can just as well be said that the
author's choice of a certain aspect of the world deter-
mines the reader and, vice-versa, that it is by choosing
his reader that the author decides upon his subject.

Thus, all works of the mind contain within themselves
the image of the reader for whom they are intended. I
could draw the portrait of Nathanael on the basis of Les
Nourritures terrestres: I can see that the alienation from
which he is urged to free himself is the family, the real-
estate he owns or will own by inheritance, the utilitarian
project, a conventional moralism, a narrow theism; I
also see that he is cultured and has leisure, since it would
be absurd to offer Menalquc as an example to an un-
skilled laborer, a man out of work, or an American negro ;
I know that he is not threatened by any external danger,
neither by hunger, war, nor class or racial oppression; the
only danger is that of being the victim of his own milieu.
Therefore, he is a white rich Aryan, the heir of a great
bourgeois family which lives in a period which is still
relatively stable and easy, in which the ideology of the
possessing class is barely beginning to decline, exactly the
Daniel de Fontanin whom Roger Martin du Card later
presented to us as an enthusiastic admirer of Andre Gide.
To take a still more recent example, it is striking that
The Silence of the Sea, a work written by a man who was
a member of the resistance from the very beginning and
whose aim is perfectly evident, was received with hos-
tility in the emigre circles of New York, London, and
sometimes even Algiers, and they even went so far as to
tax its author with collaboration. The reason is that Ver-

71

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

cors did not aim at that public. In the occupied zone, on
the other hand, nobody doubted the author's intentions
or the efficacy of his writing; he was writing for us. As a
matter of fact, I do not think that one can defend Ver-
cors by saying that his German is real or that his old
Frenchman and French girl are real. Koestler has written
some very fine pages about this question; the silence of
the two French characters has no psychological verisimil-
itude; it even has a slight taste of anachronism; it re-
calls the stubborn muteness of Maupassant's patriotic
peasants during another occupation, another occupation
with other hopes, other anguish, and other customs. As
to the German officer, his portrait does not lack life, but,
as is self-evident, Vercors, who, at the time, refused to
have any contact with the army of occupation, did it
"without a model/ 5 by combining the probable elements
of this character. Thus, it is not in the name of truth
that these images should be preferred to those which
Anglo-Saxon propaganda was shaping each day. But for a
Frenchman of continental France Vercors' story, in 1941,
was effective. When the enemy is separated from you by
a barrier of fire, you have to judge him as a whole, as the
incarnation of evil; all war is a Manicheism. It is there-
fore understandable that the English newspapers did not
waste their time distinguishing the wheat from the chaff
in the German army. But, vice-versa, the conquered and
occupied populations, who mingled with their conquer-
ors, relearned by familiarization and the effects of clever
propaganda to consider them as men. Good men and
bad men; good and bad at the same time. A work which
in '41 would have presented the German soldiers to them

72

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

as ogres would have made them laugh and would have
failed in its purpose.

As early as the end of '42 The Silence of the Sea had
lost its effectiveness; the reason is that the war was start-
ing again on our soil. On one side, underground propa-
ganda, sabotage, derailment of trains, and acts of vio-
lence; and on the other, curfew, deportations, imprison-
ment, torture, and execution of hostages. An invisible
barrier of fire once again separated Germans and French-
men. We no longer wished to know whether the Germans
who plucked out the eyes and ripped off the nails of our
friends were accomplices or victims of Nazism; it was
no longer enough to maintain a lofty silence before them;
besides, they would not have tolerated it. At this turn of
the war it was necessary to be either for them or against
them. In the midst of bombardments and massacres, of
burned villages and deportations, Vercors 5 story seemed
like an idyll; it had lost its public. Its public was the man
of '41 humiliated by defeat but astonished at the studied
courtesy of the occupant, desiring peace, terrified by the
spectre of Bolshevism and misled by the speeches of
Petain. It was in vain to present the Germans to this man
as bloodthirsty brutes. On the contrary, you had to admit
to him that they might be polite and even likable, and
since he had discovered with surprise that most of them
were "men like us," he had to be re-shown that even if
such were the case, fraternizing was impossible, that the
more likable they seemed, the more unhappy and im-
potent they were, and that it was necessary to fight
against a regime and an ideology even if the men who
brought it to us did not seem bad. And, in short, as one

73

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

was addressing a passive crowd, as there were still rather
few important organizations, and as these showed them-
selves to be highly precautions in their recruiting, the
only form of opposition that could be required of the
population was silence, scorn, and an obedience which
was forced and which showed it.

Thus, Vercors 5 story defined its public; by defining it,
it defined itself. It wanted to combat within the mind
of the French bourgeoisie of 1941 the effects of Petain's
interview with Hitler at Montoire. A year and a half
after the defeat it was alive, virulent, and effective. In
a half-century it will no longer excite anyone. An ill-
informed public will still read it as an agreeable and
somewhat languid tale about the war of 1939. It seems
that bananas have a better taste when they have just been
picked. Works of the mind should likewise be eaten on
the spot.

One might be tempted to accuse any attempt to ex-
plain a work of the mind by the public to which it is
addressed for its vain subtlety and its indirect character.
Is it not more simple, direct, and rigorous to take the
condition of the author himself as the determining factor?
Ought one not be satisfied with Taine's notion of the
"milieu 5 ? I answer that the explanation by the milieu is,
in effect, determinative: the milieu produces the writer;
that is why I do not believe in it. On the contrary, the
public calls to him, that is, it puts questions to his free-
dom. The milieu is a vis a tergo\ the public, on the con-
trary, is a waiting, an emptiness to be filled in, an aspira-
tion, figuratively and literally. In a word, it is the other.
And I am so far from rejecting the explanation of the

74

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

work by the situation of the man that I have always con-
sidered the project of writing as the free exceeding of
a certain human and total situation. In which, moreover,
it is not different from other undertakings, fitiemble in a
witty but superficial article writes, 1 "I was going to re-
vise my little dictionary when chance put three lines of
Jean-Paul Sartre right under my nose: 'In effect, for us
the writer is neither a Vestal nor an Ariel. Do what he
may, he's in the thick of it, marked and compromised
down to his deepest refuge. 3 To be in the thick of it, up
to the ears. I recognized, in a way, the words of Blaise
Pascal: c We are embarked. 5 But at once I saw engage-
ment lose all its value, reduced suddenly to the most or-
dinary of facts, the fact of the prince and the slave, to
the human condition,"

That's what I said all right. But fitiemble is being
silly. If every man is embarked, that does not at all mean
that he is fully conscious of it. Most men pass their time
in hiding their engagement from themselves. That does
not necessarily mean that they attempt evasions by lying,
by artificial paradises, or by a life of make-believe. It is
enough for them to dim their lanterns, to see the fore-
ground without the background and, vice-versa, to see
the ends while passing over the means in silence, to re-
fuse solidarity with their kind, to take refuge in the
spirit of pompousness, to remove all value from life by
considering it from the point of view of someone who is
dead, and at the same time, all horror from death by
fleeing it in the banality of everyday existence, to per-

1. Etiemble: "Happy the writers who die for something." Combat, January
24, 1947.

75

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

suade themselves, if they belong to an oppressing class,
that they are escaping their class by the loftiness of their
feelings, and, if they belong to the oppressed, to conceal
from themselves their complicity with oppression by as-
serting that one can remain free while in chains if one
has a taste for the inner life. Writers can have recourse
to all this just like anyone else. There are some, and
they are the majority, who furnish a whole arsenal of
ruses to the reader who wants to go on sleeping quietly.
I shall say that a writer is engaged when he tries to
achieve the most lucid and the most complete conscious-
ness of being embarked, that is, when he causes the en-
gagement of immediate spontaneity to advance, for him-
self and others, to the reflective. The writer is, par excel-
lence, a mediator and his engagement is mediation. But, if
it is true that we must account for his work on the basis
of his condition, it must also be borne in mind that his
condition is not only that of a man in general but pre-
cisely that of a writer as well. Perhaps he is a Jew, and
a Czech, and of peasant family, but he is a Jewish writer,
a Czech writer and of rural stock. When, in another ar-
ticle, I tried to define the situation of the Jew, the best
I could do was this: "The Jew is a man whom other
men consider as a Jew and who is obliged to choose him-
self on the basis of the situation which is made for
him. 53 For there are qualities which come to us solely by
means of the judgment of others. In the case of the
writer, the case is more complex, for no one is obliged
to choose himself as a writer. Hence, freedom is at the
origin. I am an author, first of all, by my free project of
writing. But at once it follows that I become a man

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

whom other men consider as a writer, that is, who has to
respond to a certain demand and who has been invested
whether he likes it or not, with a certain social function.
Whatever game he may want to play, he must play it
on the basis of the representation which others have of
him. He may want to modify the character that one at-
tributes to the man of letters in a given society; but in
order to change it, he must first slip into it. Hence, the
public intervenes, with its customs, its vision of the world,
and its conception of society and of literature within that
society. It surrounds the writer, it hems him in, and its
imperious or sly demands, its refusals and its flights, are
the given facts on whose basis a work can be constructed.
Let us take the case of the great negro writer, Richard
Wright. If we consider only his condition as a man, that
is, as a Southern "nigger" transported to the North, we
shall at once imagine that he can only write about
Negroes or Whites seen through the eyes of Negroes.
Can one imagine for a moment that he would agree to
pass his life in the contemplation of the eternal True,
Good, and Beautiful when ninety percent of the negroes
in the South are practically deprived of the right to
vote? And if anyone speaks here about the treason of the
clerks, I answer that there are no clerks among the op-
pressed. Clerks are necessarily the parasites of oppressing
classes or races. Thus, if an American negro finds that
he has a vocation as a writer, he discovers his subject at
the same time. He is the man who sees the whites from
the outside, who assimilates the white culture from the
outside, and each of whose books will show the alienation
of the black race within American society. Not objeo

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

lively, like the realists, but passionately, and in a way that
will compromise his reader. But this examination leaves
the nature of his work undetermined; he might be a
pamphleteer, a blues-writer, or the Jeremiah of the
Southern negroes.

If we want to go further, we must consider his public.
To whom does Richard Wright address himself? Cer-
tainly not to the universal man. The essential character-
istic of the notion of the universal man is that he is not
involved in any particular age, and that he is no more
and no less moved by the lot of the negroes of Louisiana
than by that of the Roman slaves in the time of Spartacus.
The universal man can think of nothing but universal
values. He is a pure and abstract affirmation of the
inalienable right of man. But neither can Wright think of
intending his books for the white racists of Virginia or
South Carolina whose minds are made up in advance and
who will not open them. Nor to the black peasants of the
bayous who can not read. And if he seems to be happy
about the reception his books have had in Europe, still
it is obvious that at the beginning he had not the slightest
idea of writing for the European public. Europe is far
away. Its indignation is ineffectual and hypocritical. Not
much is to be expected from the nations which have en-
slaved the Indies, Indo-China, and negro Africa. These
considerations are enough to define his readers. He is
addressing himself to the cultivated negroes of the North
and the white Americans of good-will (intellectuals, dem-
ocrats of the left, radicals, C.I.O. workers).

It is not that he is not aiming through them at all men
but it is through them that he is thus aiming. Just as

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

one can catch a glimpse of eternal freedom at the horizon
of the historical and concrete freedom which it pursues,
so the human race is at the horizon of the concrete and
historical group of its readers. The illiterate negro peas-
ants and the Southern planters represent a margin of ab-
stract possibilities around its real public. After all, an il-
literate may learn to read. Black Boy may fall into the
hands of the most stubborn of negrophobes and may
open his eyes. This merely means that every human
project exceeds its actual limits and extends itself step
by step to the infinite.

Now, it is to be noted that there is a fracture at the
very heart of this actual public. For Wright, the negro
readers represent subjectivity. The same childhood, the
same difficulties, the same complexes: a mere hint is
enough for them; they understand with their hearts. In
trying to become clear about his own personal situation,
he clarifies theirs for them. He mediates, names, and
shows them the life they lead from day to day in its im-
mediacy, the life they suffer without finding words to
formulate their sufferings. He is their conscience, and the
movement by which he raises himself from the im-
mediate to the reflective recapturing of his condition is
that of his whole race. But whatever the good-will of the
white readers may be, for a negro author they represent
the Other. They have not lived through what he has
lived through. They can understand the negro's condi-
tion only by an extreme stretch of the imagination and by
relying upon analogies which at any moment may deceive
them. On the other hand, Wright does not completely
know them. It is only from without that he conceives their

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

proud security and that tranquil certainty, common to
all white Aryans, that the world is white and that they
own it. The words he puts down on paper have not the
same context for whites as for negroes. They must be
chosen by guesswork, since he does not know what res-
onances they will set up in those strange minds. And when
he speaks to them, their very aim is changed. It is a mat-
ter of implicating them and making them take stock of
their responsibilities. He must make them indignant and
ashamed.

Thus, each work of Wright contains what Baudelaire
would have called "a double simultaneous postulation;"
each word refers to two contexts; two forces are applied
simultaneously to each phrase and determine the incom-
parable tension of his tale. Had he spoken to the whites
alone, he might have turned out to be more prolix, more
didactic, and more abusive; to the negroes alone, still
more elliptical, more of a confederate, and more elegiac.
In the first case, his work might have come close to sat-
ire; in the second, to prophetic lamentations. Jeremiah
spoke only to the Jews. But Wright, a writer for a split
public, has been able both to maintain and go beyond
this split. He has made it the pretext for a work of art.

The writer consumes and does not produce, even if
he has decided to serve the community's interests with
his pen. His works remain gratuitous; thus no price can
be set on their value. Their market value is fixed arbi-
trarily. In some periods he is pensioned and in others he
gets a percentage of the sales of the book. But there is
no more common measure between the work of the mind

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

and percentage remuneration in modern society than
there was between the poem and the royal pension under
the old regime. Actually, the writer is not paid; he is
fed, well or badly, according to the period. The system
cannot work any differently, for his activity is useless.
It is not at all useful; it is sometimes harmful for society
to become self-conscious. For the fact is that the useful
is defined within the framework of an established society
and in relationship to institutions, values, and ends which
are already fixed. If society sees itself and, in particular,
sees itself as seen, there is, by virtue of this very fact, a
contesting of the established values of the regime. The
writer presents it with its image; he calls upon it to as-
sume it or to change itself. At any rate, it changes; it loses
the equilibrium which its ignorance had given it; it
wavers between shame and cynicism; it practises dis-
honesty; thus, the writer gives society a guilty con-
science; he is thereby in a state of perpetual antagonism
toward the conservative forces which are maintaining the
balance he tends to upset. For the transition to the
mediate which can be brought about only by a negation
of the immediate is a perpetual revolution.

Only the governing classes can allow themselves the lux-
ury of remunerating so unproductive and dangerous an
activity, and if they do so, it is a matter both of tactics and
of misapprehension. Misapprehension for the most part:
free from material cares, the members of the governing
elite are sufficiently detached to want to have a reflective
knowledge of themselves. They want to retrieve them-
selves, and they charge the artist with presenting them
with their image without realizing that he will then make

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

them assume it. A tactic on the part of some who, having
recognized the danger, pension the artist in order to con-
trol his destructive power. Thus, the writer is a parasite
of the governing "elite. 55 But, functionally, he moves in op-
position to the interests of those who keep him alive. 1
Such is the original conflict which defines his condition.

Sometimes the conflict is obvious. We still talk about
the courtiers who made the success of the Marriage of
Figaro though it sounded the death-knell of the regime.
Other times, it is masked, because to name is to show,
and to show is to change. And as this activity of contesta-
tion, which is harmful to the established interests, ven-
tures, in its very modest way, to concur in a change of
regime, as, on the other hand, the oppressed classes have
neither the leisure nor the taste for reading, the objective
aspect of the conflict may express itself as an antagonism
between the conservative forces, or the real public of the
writer, and the progressive forces, or the virtual public.

In a classless society, one whose internal structure
would be permanent revolution, the writer might be a
mediator for all, and his contestation on principle might
precede or accompany the changes in fact. In my opin-
ion this is the deeper meaning we should give to the no-
tion of self-criticism. The expanding of the real public
up to the limits of his virtual public would bring about
within his mind a reconciliation of hostile tendencies. Lit-
erature, entirely liberated, would represent negativity
insofar as it is a necessary moment in reconstruction. But

1. To-day his public is spread out. He sometimes runs into a hundred thou-
sand copies. A hundred thousand copies sold, that makes four hundred thou-
sand readers. Thus, for France, one out of a hundred in the population.

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

to my knowledge this type of society does not for the
moment exist, and it may be doubted whether it is pos-
sible. Thus, the conflict remains. It is at the origin of
what I would call the writer's ups and downs and his bad
conscience.

It is reduced to its simplest expression when the virtual
public is practically nil and when the writer, instead of
remaining on the margin of the privileged class, is ab-
sorbed by it. In that case literature identifies itself with
the ideology of the directing class; reflection takes place
within the class; contestation deals with details and is
carried on in the name of uncontested principles. For
example, that is what happened in Europe about the
twelfth century; the clerk wrote exclusively for clerks.
But he could keep a good conscience because there was
a divorce between the spiritual and the temporal. The
Christian Revolution brought in the spiritual, that is, the
spirit itself, as a negativity, a contestation, and a trans-
cendence, a perpetual construction, beyond the realm of
Nature, of the anti-natural city of freedoms. But it was
necessary that this universal power of surpassing the ob-
ject be first encountered as an object, that this perpetual
negation of Nature appear, in the first place, as nature,
that this faculty of perpetually creating ideologies and of
leaving them behind along the way be embodied, to
begin with, in a particular ideology. In the first centuries
of our era the spiritual was a captive of Christianity, or,
if you prefer, Christianity was the spiritual itself but alie-
nated. It was the spirit made object. Hence, it is evident
that instead of appearing as the common and forever re-
newed experience of all men, it manifested itself at first

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

as the specialty of a few. Medieval society had spiritual
needs, and, to serve them, it set up a body of specialists
who were recruited by co-optation. To-day we consider
reading and writing as human rights and, at the same
time, as means for communicating with others which are
almost as natural and spontaneous as oral language. That
is why the most uncultured peasant is a potential reader.
In the time of the clerks, they were techniques which were
reserved strictly for professionals. They were not practised
for their own sake, like spiritual exercises. Their aim was
not to obtain access to that large and vague humanism
which was later to be called "the humanities." They were
means solely of preserving and transmitting Christian
ideology. To be able to read was to have the necessary
tool for acquiring knowledge of the sacred texts and their
innumerable commentaries; to be able to write was to be
able to comment. Other men no more aspired to possess
these professional techniques than we aspire to-day to
acquire that of the cabinet-maker or the palaeographer if
we practice other professions. The barons counted on the
clerks to produce and watch over spirituality. By them-
selves they were incapable of exercising control over
writers as the public does to-day, and they were unable
to distinguish heresy from orthodox beliefs if they were
left without help. They got excited only when the pope
had recourse to the secular arm. Then they pillaged and
burned everything, but only because they had confidence
in the pope, and they never turned up their noses at a
chance to pillage. It is true that the ideology was ulti-
mately intended for them, for them and the people, but
it was communicated to them orally by preachings, and

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

the church very early made use of a simpler language than
writing: the image. The sculpture of the cloisters and
the cathedrals, the stained-glass windows, the paintings,
and the mosaics speak of God and the Holy Story. The
clerk wrote his chronicles, his philosophical works, his
commentaries, and his poems on the margin of this vast
illustrating enterprise of faith. He intended them for his
peers; they were controlled by his superiors. He did not
have to be concerned with the effects which his works
would produce upon the masses, since he was assured in
advance that they would have no knowledge of them. Nor
did he want to introduce remorse into the conscience of a
feudal plunderer or caitiff; violence was unlettered. Thus,
for him it was neither a question of reflecting its own
image back to the temporal, nor of taking sides, nor of dis-
engaging the spiritual from historical experience by a
continuous effort. Quite the contrary, as the writer was
of the Church, as the Church was an immense spiritual
college which proved its dignity by its resistance to change,
as history and the temporal were one and spirituality was
radically distinct from the temporal, as the aim of his
clerkship was to maintain this distinction, that is, to
maintain itself as a specialized body in the face of the
century, as, in addition, the economy was so divided up
and as means of communication were so few and slow
that events which occurred in one province had no effect
upon the neighboring province and as a monastery could
enjoy its individual peace, like the hero of the Acharnians,
while its country was at war, the writer's mission was to
prove his autonomy by delivering himself to the exclusive
contemplation of the Eternal. He incessantly affirmed the

85

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Eternal's existence and demonstrated it precisely by the
fact that his only concern was to regard it. In this sense,
he realized, in effect, the ideal of Benda, but one can see
under what conditions : spirituality and literature had to
be alienated, a particular ideology had to triumph, a
feudal pluralism had to make the isolation of the clerks
possible, virtually the whole population had to be illit-
erate, and the only public of the writer could be the col-
lege of other writers. It is inconceivable that one can
practise freedom of thought, write for a public which
coincides with the restricted collectivity of specialists, and
restrict oneself to describing the content of eternal values
and a priori ideas. The good conscience of the medieval
clerk flowered on the death of literature.

However, in order for writers to preserve this happy
conscience it is not quite necessary that their public be
reduced to an established body of professionals. It is
enough for them to be steeped in the ideology of the
privileged classes, to be completely permeated with it, and
to be unable even to conceive any others. But in this case
their function is modified; they are no longer asked to be
the guardians of dogma but merely not to make them-
selves its detractors. As a second example of the adherence
of writers to established ideology, one might, I believe,
choose the French seventeenth century.

The secularization of the writer and his public was in
process of being completed in that age. It certainly had
its origin in the expansive force of the written thing, its
monumental character, and the appeal to freedom which
is hidden away in any work of the mind. But external
circumstances contributed, such as the development of

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

education, the weakening of the spiritual power, and the
appearance of new ideologies which were expressly in-
tended for the temporal. However, secularization does
not mean universalization. The writer's public still re-
mained strictly limited. Taken as a whole, it was called
society, and this name designated a fraction of the court,
the clergy, the magistracy, and the rich bourgeoisie. Con-
sidered individually, the reader was called a "gentleman"
(honnete homme] and he exercised a certain function
of censorship which was called taste. In short, he was both
a member of the upper classes and a specialist. If he crit-
icized the writer, it was because he himself could write.
The public of Corneille, Pascal, and Descartes was Mme.
de Sevigne, the Chevalier de Mere, Madame de Grignan,
Madame de Rambouillet, and Saint-vremonde. To-day
the public, in relation to the writer, is in a state of pas-
sivity : it waits for ideas or a new art form to be imposed
upon it. It is the inert mass wherein the idea will assume
flesh. Its means of control is indirect and negative; one
can not say that it gives its opinion; it simply buys or does
not buy the book; the relationship between author and
reader is analogous to that of male and female: reading
has become a simple means of information and writing a
very general means of communication. In the seventeenth
century being able to write already meant really being
able to write well. Not that Providence divided the gift
of style equally among all men, but because the reader, if
not strictly identical with the writer, was a potential
writer. He belonged to a parasitical elite for whom the
art of writing was, if not a profession, at least the mark of
its superiority. One read because he could write; with a

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

little luck he might have been able to write what he read.
The public was active; productions of the mind were
really submitted to it. It judged them by a scale of values
which it helped maintain. A revolution analogous to ro-
manticism is not conceivable in this period because there
would have to have been the concurrence of an indecisive
mass, which one surprises, overwhelms, and suddenly
animates by revealing to it ideas or feelings of which it
was ignorant, and which, lacking firm convictions, con-
stantly requires being ravished and fecundated. In the
seventeenth century convictions were unshakeable; the
religious ideology went hand in hand with a political
ideology which the temporal itself secreted; no one pub-
licly questioned the existence of God or the divine right
of kings. "Society" had its language, its graces, and its
ceremonies which it expected to find in the books it read.
Its conception of time, too. As the two historical facts
which it constantly pondered original sin and redemp-
tion belonged to a remote past, as it was also from this
past that the great governing families drew their pride and
the justification of their privileges, as the future could
bring nothing new, since God was too perfect to change,
and since the two great earthly powers, the Church and
the Monarchy, aspired only to immutability, the active
element of temporality was the past, which is itself a
phenomenal degradation of the Eternal; the present is a
perpetual sin which can find an excuse for itself only if
it reflects, with the least possible unfaithfulness, the
image of a completed era. For an idea to be received, it
must prove its antiquity; for a work of art to please, it
must have been inspired by an ancient model. Again we

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find writers expressly making themselves the guardians
of this ideology. There were still great clerks who belonged
to the Church and who had no other concern than to de-
fend dogma. To them were added the "watchdogs" of
the temporal, historians, court poets, jurists, and phil-
osophers who were concerned with establishing and main-
taining the ideology of the absolute monarchy. But we
see appearing at their side a third category of writers,
strictly secular, who, for the most part, accepted the reli-
gious and political ideology of the age without thinking
that they were bound to prove it or preserve it. They did
not write about it, they accepted it implicitly. For them,
it was what we called a short time ago the context or
the ensemble of the presuppositions common to readers
and author which are necessary to make the writings
of the latter intelligible to the former. In general, they
belonged to the bourgeoisie; they were pensioned by the
nobility. As they consumed without producing, and as
the nobility did not produce either but lived off the work
of others, they were the parasites of a parisitic class. They
no longer lived in a college but formed an implicit cor-
poration in that highly integrated society, and to remind
them constantly of their collegiate origin and their former
clerkship the royal power chose some of them and
grouped them in a sort of symbolic college, the French
Academy. Fed by the king and read by an elite, they were
concerned solely with responding to the demands of this
limited public. They had as good or almost as good a
conscience as the twelfth-century clerks. It is impossible
to speak of a virtual public as distinguished from a real
public in this age. La Bruyre happened to speak about

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

peasants, but he did not speak to them, and if he took
note of their misery, it was not for the sake of drawing an
argument against the ideology he accepted, but in the
name of that ideology: it was a disgrace for enlightened
monarchs and good Christians. Thus, one spoke about
the masses above their heads and without even conceiving
the notion that one might help them become self-con-
scious. And the homogeneity of the public banished all
contradiction from the authors 5 souls. They were not
pulled between real but detestable readers and readers
who were virtual and desirable but out of reach; they did
not ask themselves questions about their role in the world,
for the writer questions himself about his mission only in
ages when it is not clearly defined and when he must in-
vent or re-invent it, that is, when he notices, beyond the
elite who read him, an amorphous mass of possible readers
whom he may or may not choose to win, and when he
must himself decide, in the event that he has the opport-
unity to reach them, what his relations with them are to
be. The authors of the seventeenth century had a definite
function because they addressed an enlightened, strictly
limited, and active public which exercised permanent
control over them. Unknown by the people, their job was
to reflect back its own image to the elite which supported
them. But there are many ways of reflecting an image:
certain portraits are by themselves contestations because
they have been made from without and without passion
by a painter who refuses any complicity with his model.
However, in order for a writer merely to conceive the idea
of drawing a portrait-contestation of his real reader, he
must have become conscious of a contradiction between

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

himself and his public, that is, he must come to his readers
from without and must consider them with astonishment,
or he must feel the astonished regard of unfamiliar minds
(ethnic minorities, oppressed classes, etc.) weighing upon
the little society which he forms with them. But in the
seventeenth century, since the virtual public did not ex-
ist, since the artist accepted without criticism the ideo-
logy of the elite, he made himself an accomplice of his
public. No unfamiliar stare came to trouble him in his
games. Neither the prose-writer nor even the poet was
accursed. They did not have to decide with each work
what the meaning and value of literature were, since its
meaning and value were fixed by tradition. Well inte-
grated in a hierarchical society, they knew neither the
pride nor the anguish of being "different"; in short, they
were classical. There is classicism when a society has
taken on a relatively stable form and when it has been
permeated with the myth of its perenniality, that is, when
it confounds the present with the eternal and historicity
with traditionalism, when the hierarchy of classes is such
that the virtual public never exceeds the real public and
when each reader is for the writer a qualified critic and
a censor, when the power of the religious and political
ideology is so strong and the interdictions so rigorous that
in no case is there any question of discovering new coun-
tries of the mind, but only of putting into shape the com-
monplaces adopted by the elite, in such a way that read-
ing which, as we have seen, is the concrete relation be-
tween the writer and his public is a ceremony of re-
cognition analogous to the bow of salutation, that is, the
ceremonious affirmation that author and reader are of

91

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the same world and have the same opinions about every-
thing. Thus, each production of the mind is at the same
time an act of courtesy, and style is the supreme courtesy
of the author toward his reader, and the reader, for his
part, never tires of finding the same thoughts in the most
diverse of books because these thoughts are his own and
he does not ask to acquire others but only to be offered
with magnificence those which he already has. Hence,
it is in a spirit of complicity that the author presents and
the reader accepts a portrait which is necessarily abstract ;
addressing a parasitical class, he can not show man at
work or, in general, the relations between man and ex-
ternal nature. As, on the other hand, there are bodies of
specialists who, under the control of the Church and the
Monarchy, are concerned with maintaining the spiritual
and secular ideology, the writer does not even suspect
the importance of economic, religious, metaphysical, and
political factors in the constitution of the person; and as
the society in which he lives confounds the present with
the eternal he can not even imagine the slightest change
in what he calls human nature. He conceives history as
a series of accidents which affect the eternal man on the
surface without deeply modifying him, and if he had to
assign a meaning to historical duration he would see in
it both an eternal repetition, so that previous events can
and ought to provide lessons for his contemporaries, and a
process of slight degeneration, since the fundamental
events of history are long since passed and since, perfec-
tion in letters having been attained in Antiquity, his an-
cient models seem beyond rivalry. And in all this he is once
again fully in harmony with his public which considers

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work as a curse, which does not feel its situation in his-
tory and in the world for the simple reason that it is
privileged and because its only concern is faith, respect
for the Monarch, passion, war, death, and courtesy. In
short, the image of classical man is purely psychological
because the classical public is conscious only of his psy-
chology. Furthermore, it must be understood that this
psychology is itself traditionalist, it is not concerned with
discovering new and profound truths about the human
heart or with setting up hypotheses. It is in unstable
societies, when the public exists on several social levels,
that the writer, torn and dissatisfied, invents explanations
for his anguish. The psychology of the seventeenth cent-
ury is purely descriptive. It is not based so much upon the
author's personal experience as it is the aesthetic ex-
pression of what the elite thinks about itself. La Roche-
foucauld borrows the form and the content of his maxims
from the divertissements of the salons. The casuistry of the
Jesuits, the etiquette of the Precieuses, the portrait game,
the ethics of Nicole, and the religious conception of the
passions are at the origin of a hundred other works. The
comedies draw their inspiration from ancient psychology
and the plain common sense of the upper bourgeoisie.
Society is thoroughly delighted at seeing itself mirrored
in them because it recognizes the notions it has about it-
self; it does not ask to be shown what it is, but it asks
rather for a reflection of what it thinks it is. To be sure,
some satires are permitted, but it is the elite which,
through pamphlets and comedies, carries on, in the name
of its morality, the cleansings and the purges necessary
for its health. The ridiculous marquis, the litigants, or

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the Precieuses are never made fun of from a point of view
external to the governing class; it is always a matter of
eccentrics who are inassimilable in a civilized society and
who live on the margin of the collective life. The Misan-
thrope is twitted because he lacks courtesy, Cathos and
Madelon, because they have too much. Philaminte goes
counter to the accepted ideas about women; the bour-
geois gentleman is odious to the rich bourgeois who have
a lofty modesty and who know the greatness and the
humbleness of their condition, and, at the same time, to
the gentlemen because he wants to push his way into the
nobility. This internal and, so to speak, physiological
satire has no connection with the great satire of Beau-
marchais, P.L. Courier, J. Valles, and Celine; it is less
courageous and much more severe because it exhibits
the repressive action which the collectivity practices upon
the weak, the sick, and the maladjusted. It is the pitiless
laughter of a gang of street-urchins at the awkwardness
of their butt.

Bourgeois in origin and mores, more like Oronte and
Chrysale in his home life than like his brilliant and rest-
less confreres of 1780 or 1830, yet accepted in the Society
of the Great and -pensioned by them, slightly unclassed
from above, yet convinced that talent is no substitute for
birth, docile to the reprimands of the clergy, respectful of
the royal power, happy to occupy a modest place in the
immense structure of which the Church and the Mo-
narchy are the pillars, somewhat above the merchants and
the scholars, below the nobles and the clergy, the writer
practises his profession with a good conscience, convinced

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that he has come too late, that everything has been said,
and that the only proper thing to do is to re-say it agree-
ably. He conceives the glory which awaits him as a feeble
reflection of hereditary titles and if he expects it to be
eternal it is because he does not even suspect that the
society of his readers may be overthrown by social changes.
Thus, the permanence of the royal family seems to him a
guarantee of that of his renown.

Yet, almost in spite of himself, the mirror which he
modestly offers to his readers is magical : it enthralls and
compromises. Even though everything has been done to
offer them only a flattering and complying image, more
subjective than objective and more internal than external
this image remains none the less a work of art, that is, it
has its basis in the freedom of the author and is an appeal
to the freedom of the reader. Since it is beautiful, it is
made of glass; aesthetic distance puts it out of reach.
Impossible to be delighted with it, to find any comfortable
warmth in it, any discrete indulgence. Even though it is
made up of the commonplaces of the age and that smug
complacency which unite contemporaries like an umbilical
cord, it is supported by a freedom and thereby another
kind of objectivity. It is itself, to be sure, that the elite
finds in the mirror, but itself as it would see itself if it
went to the very extremes of severity. It is not congealed
into an object by the gaze of the Other, for neither the
peasant nor the working-man has yet become the Other
for it, and the art of reflective presentation which charact-
erizes the art of the seventeenth century is a strictly in-
ternal process; however, it pushes to the limits each one's

95

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

efforts to see into himself clearly; it is a perpetual cogito.
To be sure, it does not call idleness, oppression, or parasi-
tism into question, because these aspects of the governing
class are revealed only to observers who place themselves
outside of it; hence, the image which is reflected back
to it is strictly psychological. But spontaneous behavior,
by passing to the reflective state, loses its innocence and
the excuse of immediacy: it must be assumed or changed.
It is, to be sure, a world of courtesy and ceremony which
is offered to the reader, but he is is already emerging from
this world since he is invited to know it and to recognize
himself in it. In this sense, Racine was not wrong when he
said in regard to Phedre that "the passions are presented
before your eyes only to show all the disorder of which
they are the cause". On condition that one does not take
that to mean that his express purpose was to inspire a
horror of love. But to paint passion is already to go be-
yond it, already to shed it. It is not a matter of chance
that, about the same time, philosophers were suggesting
the idea of curing one's self of it by knowledge. And as
the reflective practice of freedom when confronted by the
passions is usually adorned with the name of morals, it
must be recognized that the art of the seventeenth century
is eminently a moralizing art. Not that its avowed aim is
to teach virtue, nor that it is poisoned by the good inten-
tions which produce bad literature, but by the mere fact
that it quietly offers the reader his own image, it makes
it unbearable for him. Moralizing: this is both a defini-
tion and a limit. It is not moralizing only; if it proposes
to man that he transcend the psychological toward the

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moral, it is because it regards religious, metaphysical,
political, and social problems as solved; but its action is
none the less "orthodox. 55 As it confounds universal man
with the particular men who are in power, it does not
dedicate itself to the liberation of any concrete category
of the oppressed; however, the writer, though completely
assimilated by the oppressing class, is by no means its ac-
complice; his work is unquestionably a liberator since its
effect, within this class, is to free man from himself.

Up to this point we have been considering the case
in which the writer's potential public was nil, or just
about, and in which his real public was not torn by
any conflict. We have seen that he could then accept
the current ideology with a good conscience and that he
launched his appeals to freedom within the ideology itself.
If the potential public suddenly appears, or if the real
public is broken up into hostile factions everything
changes. We must now consider what happens to liter-
ature when the writer is led to reject the ideology of the
ruling classes.

The eighteenth century was the palmy time, unique in
history, and the soon-to-be-lost paradise, of French writ-
ers. Their social condition had not changed. Bourgeois in
origin, with very few exceptions, they were unclassed by
the favors of the great. The circle of their real readers had
grown perceptibly larger because the bourgeoisie had be-
gun to read, but they were still unknown to the "lower 55
classes, and if the writers spoke of them more often than
did La Bruyere and Fenelon, they never addressed them,
even in spirit. However, a profound upheaval had broken
their public in two; they had to satisfy contradictory de-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

mands. Their situation was characterized from the be-
ginning by tension. This tension was manifested in a very
particular way. The governing class had in fact lost con-
fidence in its ideology. It had put itself into a position of
defense; it tried, to a certain extent, to retard the diffusion
of new ideas, but it could not keep from being penetrated
by these ideas. It understood that its religious and politi-
cal principles were the best instruments for establishing its
power, but the fact is that as it saw them only as instru-
ments, it ceased to believe in them completely. Pragmatic
truth had replaced revealed truth. If censorship and prohi-
bitions were more visible, they covered up a secret weak-
ness and a cynicism of despair. There were no more clerks;
church literature was empty apologetics, a fist holding on
to dogmas which were breaking loose; it was turning
against freedom; it addressed itself to respect, fear, and
self-interest, and by ceasing to be a free appeal to free
men, it was ceasing to be literature. This distraught elite
turned to the genuine writer and asked him to do the im-
possible, not to spare his severity, if he was bent on it, but
to breathe at least a bit of freedom into a wilting ideology,
to address himself to his readers 5 reason and to per-
suade them to adopt dogmas which, with time, had be-
come irrational. In short, to turn propagandist with-
out ceasing to be a writer. But it was playing a losing
game. Since its principles were no longer a matter of im-
mediate and unformulated evidence and since it had to
present them to the writer so that he might come to their
defense, since there was no longer any question of saving
them for their own sake but rather of maintaining order,
it contested their validity by its very effort to re-establish

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

them. The writer who consented to buttress this shaky ide-
ology at least consented to do so, and this voluntary ad-
herence to principles which, in the past, had governed
minds without being noticed now freed him from them.
He was already going beyond them. In spite of himself he
was emerging into solitude and freedom. The bourgeoisie,
on the other hand, which constituted what in Marxist
terms is called the rising class, was trying at this same time
to disengage itself from the ideology that was being im-
posed upon it and to construct one better suited to its own
purpose.

Now, this "rising class, 55 which was soon to claim the
right to participate in affairs of State, was subject only to
political oppression. Confronted with a ruined nobility,
it was in process of very calmly attaining economic pre-
eminence. It already had money, culture, and leisure.
Thus, for the first time an oppressed class was presenting
itself to the writer as a real public. But the conjunction
was still more favorable; for this awakening class, which
was reading and trying to think, had not yet produced an
organized revolutionary party which would secrete its
own ideology as did the Church in the Middle Ages. The
writer was not yet wedged, as we shall see that he was
later to be, between the dying ideology of a declining class
and the rigorous ideology of the rising class. The bour-
geoisie wanted light; it felt vaguely that its thought was
alienated, and it wanted to become conscious of itself. One
could probably find some traces of organization : material-
ist societies, groups of intellectuals, free masonry. But they
were chiefly associations for inquiry which were waiting
for ideas rather than producing them. To be sure, a form

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

of popular and spontaneous writing was spreading, the
secret and anonymous tract. But this literature of ama-
teurs did not compete with the professional writer but
rather goaded and solicited him by informing him about
the confused aspirations of the collectivity. Thus, the bour-
geoisie as opposed to a public of half -specialists, which
with difficulty held on to its position and which was al-
ways recruited at the Court and from the upper circles of
society offered the rough draft of a mass public. In re-
gard to literature, it was in a state of relative passivity
since it had no experience in the art of writing, no pre-
conceived opinion about style and literary genres, and
was awaiting everything, form and content, from the
genius of the writer.

Solicited by both sides, the writer found himself be-
tween the two hostile factions of his public as the arbiter
of their conflict. He was no longer a clerk; the ruling class
was not the only one supporting him. It is true that it was
still pensioning him, but it was the bourgeoisie which was
buying his books. He was collecting at both ends. His
father had been a bourgeois and his son would be one;
one might thus be tempted to see in him a bourgeois more
gifted than others but similarly oppressed, a man who had
attained knowledge of his state under the pressure of his-
torical circumstances, in short, an inner mirror by means
of which the whole bourgeoisie became conscious of itself
and its demands. But this would be a superficial view. It
has not been sufficiently pointed out that a class can ac-
quire class consciousness only if it sees itself from within
and without at the same time; in other words, if it prof-

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its by external competition; that is where the intellectuals,
the perpetually unclassed, come into the picture.

The essential characteristic of the eighteenth-century
writer was precisely an objective and subjective unclassing.
Though he still remembered his bourgeois attachments,
yet the favor of the great drew him away from his milieu;
he no longer felt any concrete solidarity with his cousin
the lawyer or his brother the village cure because he had
privileges which they had not. It was from the court and
nobility that he borrowed his manners and the very graces
of his style. Glory, his dearest hope and his consecration,
had become for him a slippery and ambiguous notion; a
fresh idea of glory was rising up in which a writer was
truly rewarded if an obscure doctor in Bruges or a brief-
less lawyer in Rheims devoured his books almost in
secret.

But the diffuse recognition of this public which he
hardly knew only half touched him. He had received from
his elders a traditional conception of fame. According
to this conception, it was the monarch who consecrated his
genius. The visible sign of his success was for Catherine or
Frederick to invite him to their table. The recompense
given to him and the dignities conferred from above did
not yet have the official impersonality of the prizes and
decorations awarded by our republics. They retained the
quasi-feudal character of man to man relations. And since
he was, above all, an eternal consumer in a society of pro-
ducers, a parasite of a parasitic class, he treated money
like a parasite. He did not earn it since there was no com-
mon measure between his work and his remuneration; he
only spent it. Therefore, even if he was poor, he lived in

101

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

luxury. Everything was a luxury to him, including, and
in fact particularly so, his writing. Yet, even in the
king's chamber he retained a rough force, a potent vul-
garity; Diderot, in the heat of a philosophical conversa-
tion, pinched the thigh of the Empress of Russia until the
blood flowed. And then, if he went too far, he could al-
ways be made to feel that he was only a scribbler. The
life of Voltaire, from his beating, his imprisonment, and
his flight to London, to the insolence of the King of Prus-
sia was a succession of triumphs and humiliations. At
times the writer enjoyed the passing favors of a marquise,
but he married his maid or a bricklayer's daughter. Hence,
his mind, as well as his public, was torn apart. But this did
not cause him to suffer; on the contrary, this original con-
tradiction was the source of his pride. He thought that he
had no obligations to anyone, that he could choose his
friends and opponents, and that it was enough for him to
take his pen in hand to free himself from the conditioning
of milieu, nation, or class. He flew, he soared, he was
pure thought, pure observation. He chose to write to vin-
dicate his unclassing which he assumed and transformed
into solitude. From the outside, he contemplated the great
with the eyes of the-bourgeois and the bourgeois with the
eyes of the nobility, and he retained enough complicity
with both to understand them equally from within. Hence,
literature, which up to then had been only a conservative
and purifying function of an integrated society, became
conscious in him and by him of its autonomy. Placed by
an extreme chance between confused aspirations and an
ideology in ruins like the writer between the bourgeoisie,
the Court, and the Church literature suddenly asserted

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

its independence. It was no longer to reflect the common-
places of the collectivity; it identified itself with Mind,
that is, with the permanent power of forming and criti-
cizing ideas.

Of course, this taking over of literature by itself was
abstract and almost purely formal, since the literary works
were not the concrete expression of any class; and as the
writers began by rejecting any deep solidarity with the
milieu from which they came as well as the one which
adopted them, literature became confused with Negativ-
ity, that is, with doubt, refusal, criticism, and contesta-
tion. But as a result of this very fact, it led to the setting
up, against the ossified spirituality of the Church, the
rights of a new spirituality, one in movement, which was
no longer identified with any ideology and which mani-
fested itself as the power of continually surpassing the
given, whatever it might be. When, in the shelter of the
structure of the very Christian monarchy, it was imitating
wonderful models, it hardly fussed about truth because
truth was only a very crude and very concrete quality of
the ideology which had been nourishing it; for the dog-
mas of the Church, to be true or, quite simply, to be, was
all one, and truth could not be conceived apart from the
system. But now that spirituality had become this abstract
movement which cut through all ideologies and then left
them along the wayside like empty shells, truth, in its
turn, was disengaged from all concrete and particular
philosophy; it was revealed in its abstract independence;
it became the regulating idea of literature and the distant
limit of the critical movement.

Spirituality, literature, and truth: these notions were

103

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

bound up in that abstract and negative moment of be-
coming self-conscious. Their instrument was analysis, a
negative and critical method which perpetually dissolves
concrete data into abstract elements and the products of
history into combinations of universal concepts. An ado-
lescent chooses to write in order to escape an oppression
from which he suffers and a solidarity he is ashamed of;
as soon as he has written a few words, he thinks he has
escaped from his milieu and class and from all milieus
and all classes and that he has broken through his histor-
ical situation by the mere fact that he has attained re-
flective and critical knowledge. Above the confusion of
those bourgeois and nobles, locked up in their particular
age by their prejudices, he has, on taking up his pen, dis-
covered himself as a timeless and unlocalized mind, in
short, as universal man. And literature, which has deliv-
ered him, is an abstract function and an a priori power of
human nature; it is the movement whereby at every
moment man frees himself from history; in short, it is
the exercise of freedom.

In the seventeenth century, by choosing to write a man
embraced a definite profession, with the tricks of the
trade, its rules and customs, its rank in the hierarchy of
the professions. In the eighteenth century, the molds were
broken; everything remained to be done; works of the
mind, instead of being put together according to estab-
lished norms and more or less by luck, were each a par-
ticular invention and were a kind of decision of the author
regarding the nature, value, and scope of Belles Lettres;
each one brought its own rules and the principles by
which it was to be judged; each one aspired to engage

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the whole of literature and to cut out new paths. It is not
by chance that the worst works of the period are also
those which claimed to be the most traditional; tragedy
and epic were the exquisite fruits of an integrated so-
ciety; in a collectivity which was torn apart, they could
subsist only in the form of survivals and pastiches.

What the eighteenth-century writer tirelessly demanded
in all his works was the right to practise an anti-histor-
ical reason against history, and in this sense all he did
was to reveal the essential requirements of abstract liter-
ature. He was not concerned with giving his readers a
clearer class consciousness. Quite the contrary, the urgent
appeal which he addressed to his bourgeois public was an
invitation to forget humiliations, prejudices, and fears;
the one he directed to his noble public was a solicitation
to strip itself of its pride of caste and its privileges. As he
had made himself universal, he could have only universal
readers, and what he required of the freedom of his con-
temporaries was that they cut their historical ties in order
to join him in universality.

What is the origin of this miracle by which, at the very
moment he was setting up abstract freedom against con-
crete oppression and Reason against History, he was go-
ing along in the very direction of historical development?
First, the bourgeoisie, by a tactic which was characteristic
of it and which it was to repeat in 1830 and 1848, joined
forces, on the eve of taking power, with those oppressed
classes which were not in a condition to push their de-
mands. And since the bonds which united social groups so
different from one another could only be very general and
very abstract, it aimed not so much at acquiring a clear

105

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

consciousness of itself, which would have opposed it to the
workmen and peasants, as to have its right to lead the op-
position recognized on the grounds that it was in a better
position to let the established powers know the de-
mands of universal human nature. On the other hand, the
revolution being prepared was a political one; there was
no revolutionary ideology and no organized party. The
bourgeoisie wanted to be enlightened; it wanted the ideol-
ogy which for centuries had mystified and alienated man
to be liquidated. There would be time later on to replace
it. For the time being, it aimed at freedom of opinion as
a step toward political power. Hence, by demanding for
kimself and as a writer freedom of thinking and of express-
ing his thought, the author necessarily served the interests
rf the bourgeois class. No more was asked of him and
iiere was nothing more he could do. In later periods, as
*ve shall see, the writer could demand his freedom to write
*vith a bad conscience; he might be aware that the op-
pressed classes wanted something other than that free-
iom. Freedom of thinking could then appear as a privi-
ege; in the eyes of some it could pass for a means of op-
cession, and the position of the writer risked becoming
intenable. But on the eve of the Revolution he enjoyed
in extraordinary opportunity, that is, it was enough for
lim to defend his profession in order to serve as a guide
o the aspirations of the rising class.

He knew it. He considered himself a guide and a spir-
tual chief. He took chances. As the ruling elite,
vhich grew increasingly nervous, lavished its graces upon
dm one day only to have him locked up the next, he had
tone of that tranquillity, that proud mediocrity, which

106

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

his predecessors had enjoyed. His glorious and eventful
life, with its sunlit crests and its dizzying steeps, was that
of an adventurer. The other evening I was reading the
dedication of Blaise Cendrars' Rum: 'To the young
people of today who are tired of literature, to prove to
them that a novel can also be an act, 55 and I thought that
we are quite unfortunate and quite guilty, since we have
to prove what in the eighteenth century was self-evident.
A work of the mind was then doubly an act since it pro-
duced ideas which were to lead to social upheavals and
since it exposed its author to danger. And this act,
whatever the book we may be considering, was always
defined in the same way; it was a liberator. And, doubt-
less, in the seventeenth century too, literature had a liber-
ating function, though one which remained veiled and im-
plicit. In the time of the Encyclopedists, it was no longer
a question of freeing the gentleman from his passions by
reflecting them back to him without complaisance, but of
helping with the pen to bring about the political freedom
simply of man. The appeal which the writer addressed to
his bourgeois public was, whether he meant it or not, an
incitement to revolt; the one which he directed to the
ruling class was an invitation to lucidity, to critical self-
examination, to the giving up of its privileges. The condi-
tion of Rousseau was much like that of Richard Wright's
writing for both enlightened negroes and whites. Before
the nobility he bore witness and at the same time was in-
viting his fellow commoners to become conscious of them-
selves. It was not only the taking of the Bastille which his
writings and those of Diderot and Condorcet were pre-
paring at long range; it was also the night of August the
fourth.

107

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

And as the writer thought that he had broken the bonds
tfhich united him to his class of origin, as he spoke to his
readers from above about universal human nature, it
;eemed to him that the appeal he made to them and the
Dart he took in their misfortunes were dictated by pure
generosity. To write is to give. In this way he accepted
ind excused what was unacceptable in his situation as a
parasite in an industrious society; this was also how he be-
came conscious of that absolute freedom, that gratuity,
vhich characterize literary creation. But though he con-
tantly had in view universal man and the abstract rights
>f human nature, there is no reason to believe that he was
tn incarnation of the clerk as Benda has described him.
lince his position was, in essence, critical, he certainly had
o have something to criticize; and the objects which first
resented themselves to criticism were the institutions,
uperstitions, traditions, and acts of a traditional gov-
rnment.

In other words, as the walls of Eternity and the Past
fhich had supported the ideological structure of the
*venteenth century cracked and gave way, the writer
erceived a new dimension of temporality in its purity:
le Present. The Present, which preceding centuries had
>metimes conceived a"S a perceptible figuration of Eter-
ity and sometimes as a degraded emanation of Antiq-
ity. He had only a confused notion of the future, but he
new that the fleeting hour which he was living was
nique and that it was his, that it was in no way inferior
> the most magnificent hours of Antiquity, since they too
ad begun by being the present. He knew that it was his
lance and that he must not waste it. That was why he

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considered the fight he had to wage not so much as a
preparation for the society of the future but rather as a
short-term enterprise, one of immediate efficacy. It was
this institution that had to be denounced and right now,
that superstition that had to be destroyed immediately,
that particular injustice that had to be rectified. This
impassioned sense of the present saved him from idealism;
he did not confine himself to contemplating the eternal
ideas of Freedom or Equality. For the first time since the
Reformation, writers intervened in public life, protested
against an unjust decree, asked for the review of a trial,
and, in short, decided that the spiritual was in the street,
at the fair, in the market place, at the tribunal, and that
it was by no means a matter of turning away from the
temporal, but, on the contrary, that one had to come back
to it incessantly and go on beyond it in each particular
circumstance.

Thus, the overthrow of his public and the crisis of the
European consciousness had invested the writer with a
new function. He conceived literature to be the permanent
practice of magnanimity. He still submitted to the strict
and severe control of his peers, but below him he caught
a glimpse of an unformed and passionate waiting, a more
feminine, more undifferentiated kind of desire which freed
him from their censorship. He had disembodied the
spiritual and had separated his cause from that of a dying
ideology; his books were free appeals to the freedom of
his readers.

The political triumph of the bourgeoisie which writers
had so eagerly desired convulsed their condition from

109

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

top to bottom and put the very essence of literature into
question. It might be said that the result of all their ef-
forts was merely a preparation for their certain ruin.
There is no doubt that by identifying the cause of belles-
lettres with that of political democracy they helped the
bourgeoisie come to power, but by the same token they
ran the risk of seeing the disappearance of the object of
their demands, that is, the constant and almost the only
subject of their writing. In short, the miraculous harmony
which united the essential demands of literature with that
of the oppressed bourgeoisie was broken as soon as both
were realized. So long as millions of men were burning to
be able to express their feelings it was fine to demand the
right to write freely and to examine everything, but once
freedom of thought and confession and equality of polit-
ical rights were gained, the defense of literature became a
purely formal game which no longer amused anyone;
something else had to be found.

Now, at the same time writers had lost their privileged
position whose origin had been the split which had torn
apart their public and which had allowed them to have
a foot in both camps. These two halves had knitted to-
gether; the bourgeoisie had absorbed the nobility or very
nearly. Authors had -to meet the demands of a unified
public. There was no hope of getting away from their class
of origin. Born of bourgeois parents, read and paid by
bourgeois, they had to remain bourgeois; the bourgeoisie
had closed around them like a prison. It was to take them
a century to get over their keen regret for the flighty and
parasitic class which had indulged them out of caprice
and whom they had remorselessly undermined in their

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

role of double agent. It seemed to them that they had
killed the goose which laid the golden eggs. The bour-
geoisie introduced new forms of oppression; however, it
was not parasitic. Doubtless, it had taken over the means
of work, but it was highly diligent in regulating the pro-
duction and distribution of its products. It did not con-
ceive literary work as a gratuitous and disinterested crea-
tion but as a paid service.

The justifying myth of this industrious and unproduc-
tive class was utilitarianism; in one way or another the
function of the bourgeois was that of intermediary be-
tween producer and consumer; it was the middle term
raised to omnipotence. Thus, in the indissoluble yoke of
means and end, he had chosen to give primary importance
to the means. The end was implied; one never looked it
in the face but passed over it in silence. The goal and
dignity of a human life was to spend itself in the ordering
of means. It was not serious to occupy oneself without in-
termediary in producing an absolute end. It was as if one
aspired to see God face to face without the help of the
Church. The only enterprises to be credited were those
whose end was the perpetually withdrawing horizon of an
infinite series of means. If the work of art entered the
utilitarian round, if it hoped to be taken seriously, it had
to descend from the heaven of unconditioned ends and
resign itself to becoming useful in its turn, that is, to pre-
senting itself as a means of ordering means. In particular,
as the bourgeois was not quite sure of himself, because his
power was not based on a decree of Providence, literature
had to help it feel bourgeois by divine right. Thus, after
having been the bad conscience of the privileged in the

111

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

eighteenth century it ran the risk in the nineteenth cen-
tury of becoming the good conscience of an oppressing
class.

Well and good, if the writer could have kept that
spirit of free criticism which in the preceding century
had been his fortune and his pride. But his public was op-
posed to that. So long as the bourgeoisie had been strug-
gling against the privileges of the nobility it had given as-
sent to destructive negativity. But now that it had power,
it passed on to construction and asked to be helped in
constructing. Contestation had remained possible within
the religious ideology because the believer referred his
obligations and the articles of faith back to the will of
God. He thereby established a concrete and feudal per-
son to person bond with the Almighty. This recourse to
the free divine arbiter introduced, although God was
perfect and chained to His perfection, an element of gra-
tuity into Christian ethics and consequently a bit of free-
dom into literature. The Christian hero was always Jacob
wrestling with the angel; the saint contested the divine
will even if he did so in order to submit to it even more
narrowly. But bourgeois ethics did not derive from Provi-
dence; its universal and abstract procedures were in-
scribed in things; they were not the effect of a sovereign
and quite amiable but personal will, they rather resem-
bled the increate laws of physics. At least, so one sup-
posed, for it was not prudent to look at them too closely.
The serious man kept from examining them precisely be-
cause their origin was obscure. Bourgeois art would either
be a means or would not be; it would forbid itself to lay

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hands on principles, for fear they might collapse 1 , and to
probe the human heart too deeply for fear of finding dis-
order in it. Its public feared nothing so much as talent,
that gay and menacing madness which uncovers the dis-
turbing roots of things by unforeseeable words and which,
by repeated appeals to freedom, stirs the still more dis-
turbing roots of men. Facility sold better; it was talent in
leash, turned against itself, the art of reassuring readers
by harmonious and expected discourse, in a tone of good
fellowship, that man and the world were quite ordinary,
transparent, without surprises, without threats, and with-
out interest.

There was more: as the only relationship which the
bourgeois had with natural forces was through inter-
mediaries, as material reality appeared to him in the
form of manufactured products, as he was surrounded as
far as the eye could see by an already humanized world
which reflected back to him his own image, as he limited
himself to gleaning on the surface of things the meaning
that other men had put forward, as his job was essentially
that of handling abstract symbols, words, figures, plans,
and diagrams for determining methods whereby his em-
ployees would share in consumer's goods, as his culture,
quite as much as his trade, inclined him to consider ideas,
he was convinced that the universe was reducible to a sys-
tem of ideas; he dissolved effort, difficulty, needs, oppres-
sion, and wars into ideas; there was no evil, only plural-
ism; certain ideas lived in a free state; they had to be

1. Dostoievsky's famous "If God does not exist, all is permissible" is the
terrible revelation which the bourgeoisie has forced itself to conceal during
the one hundred fifty years of its reign.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

integrated into the system. Thus, he conceived human
progress as a vast movement of assimilation; ideas assimi-
lated each other and so did minds. At the end of this
immense digestive process, thought would find its unifica-
tion and society its total integration.

Such optimism was at the opposite extreme of the
writer's conception of his art; the artist needs an un-
assimilable matter because beauty is not resolved into
ideas. Even if he is a prose-writer and assembles signs,
his style will have neither grace nor force if it is not sensi-
tive to the materiality of the word and its irrational re-
sistances. And if he wishes to build the universe in his
work and to support it by an inexhaustible freedom, the
reason is that he radically distinguishes things from
thought. His freedom and the thing are homogeneous only
in that both are unfathomable, and if he wishes to re-
adapt the desert or the virgin forest to the Mind, he does
so not by transforming them into ideas of desert and for-
est, but by having Being sparkle as Being, with its opacity
and its coefficient of adversity, by the indefinite spon-
taneity of Existence. That is why the work of art is not
reducible to an idea ; first, because it is a production or a
reproduction of a being, that is of something which never
quite allows itself to be thought', then, because this being
is totally penetrated by an existence, that is, by a freedom
which decides on the very fate and value of thought.
That is also why the artist has always had a special un-
derstanding of Evil, which is not the temporary and
remediable isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of
man and the world of Thought.

The bourgeois could be recognized by the fact that he

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denied the existence of social classes and particularly of
the bourgeoisie. The gentleman wished to command be-
cause he belonged to a caste. The bourgeois based his
power and his right to govern on the exquisite ripening
which comes from the secular possession of the goods of
this world. Moreover, he admitted only synthetic rela-
tionships between the owner and the thing possessed; for
the rest, he demonstrated by analysis that all men are
alike because they are invariant elements of social com-
binations and because each one of them, whatever his
rank, completely possesses hitman nature. Hence, inequal-
ities appeared as fortuitous and passing accidents which
could not alter the permanent characteristics of the so-
cial atom. There was no proletariat, that is, no synthetic
class of which each worker was a passing mode; there
were only proletarians, each isolated in his human nature,
who were not united by internal solidarity but only by
external bonds of resemblance.

The bourgeois saw only psychological relations among
the individuals whom his analytical propaganda circum-
vented and separated. That is understandable : as he had
no direct hold on things, as his work was concerned es-
sentially with men, it was purely a matter, for him, of
pleasing and intimidating. Ceremony, discipline, and
courtesy ruled his behavior; he regarded his fellow-men
as marionettes, and if he wished to acquire some knowl-
edge of their emotions and character, it was because it
seemed to him that each passion was a wire that could be
pulled. The breviary of the ambitious bourgeois was "The
Art of Making Good; 3 ' the breviary of the rich was "The
Art of Commanding.' 5 Thus, the bourgeoisie considered

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the writer as an expert. If he started reflecting on the
social order, he annoyed and frightened it. All it asked
of him was to share his practical experience of the human
heart. So, as in the seventeenth century, literature was
reduced to psychology. All the same, the psychology of
Corneille, Pascal and Vauvenargues was a cathartic ap-
peal to freedom. But the merchant distrusted the freedom
of the people he dealt with and the prefect that of the
sub-prefect. All they wanted was to be provided with
infallible recipes for winning over and dominating. Man
had to be governable as a matter of course and by modest
means. In short, the laws of the heart had to be rigorous
and without exceptions. The bourgeois bigwig no more
believed in human freedom than the scientist believes
in a miracle. And as his ethics were utilitarian, the chief
motive of his psychology was self-interest. For the writer
it was no longer a matter of addressing his work as an
appeal to absolute freedoms, but of exhibiting the psy-
chological laws which determined him to readers who
were likewise determined.

Idealism, psychologism, determinism, utilitarianism, the
spirit of seriousness, that was what the bourgeois writer
had to reflect to his public first of all. He was no longer
asked to restore the strangeness and opacity of the world,
but to dissolve it into elementary subjective impressions
which made it easier to digest nor to discover the most
intimate movements of his heart at the very depths of
his freedom, but to bring his "experience 55 face to face
with that of his readers. All his works were at once in-
ventories of bourgeois appurtenances, psychological re-
ports of an expert which invariably tended to ground the

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rights of the elite and to show the wisdom of institutions,
and handbooks of civility. The conclusions were decided
in advance; the degree of depth permitted to the in-
vestigation was also established in advance; the psycho-
logical motives were selected ; the very style was regulated.
The public feared no surprise. It could buy with its eyes
closed. But literature had been assassinated. From fimile
Augier to Marcel Prevost and Edmond Jaloux, including
Dumas fils, Pailleron, Ohnet, Bourget, and Bordeaux,
authors were found to do the job and, if I may say
so, to honor their signature to the very end. It is not
by chance that they wrote bad books; if they had talent,
they had to hide it.

The best refused. This refusal saved literature but
fixed its traits for fifty years. Indeed, from 1848 on, and
until the war of 1914, the radical unification of his public
led the author to write on principle against all his readers.
However, he sold his productions, but he despised those
who bought them and forced himself to disappoint their
wishes. It was taken for granted that it was better to be
unknown than famous, that success if the writer ever
got it in his lifetime was to be explained by a mis-
understanding. And if, by chance, the book one published
did not offend sufficiently, one added an insulting pref-
ace. This fundamental conflict between the writer and
his public was an unprecedented phenomenon in literary
history. In the seventeenth century the harmony between
the man of letters and his readers was perfect; in the
eighteenth century the author had two equally real pub-
lics at his disposal and could rely upon one or the other
as he pleased. In its early stages, romanticism had been

117

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

a vain attempt to avoid open conflict by restoring this
duality and by depending upon the aristocracy against the
liberal bourgeoisie. But after 1850 there was no longer
any means of covering up the profound contradiction
which opposed bourgeois ideology to the requirements of
literature. About the same time a virtual public was be-
ginning to take form in the deeper layers of society; it
was already waiting to be revealed to itself because the
cause of free and compulsory education had made some
progress. The Third Republic was soon to sanction the
right of all men to read and write. What was the writer
going to do? Would he choose the masses over against
the elite, and would he attempt to recreate for his own
profit the duality of publics?

At first sight, it seemed so. By means of the great move-
ment of ideas which from 1830 to 1848 were brewing in
the marginal zones of the bourgeoisie, certain writers had
the revelation of their virtual public. They adorned them,
under the name of "The People," with mystic graces.
It would be the instrument of salvation. But, as much as
they loved it, they hardly knew it and above all they did
not come from it. Sand was Baronne Dudevant; Hugo,
the son of a general of the Empire; even Michelet, the
son of a printer, was still far removed from the silk-
weavers of Lyons or the textile-weavers of Lille. Their
socialism when they were socialists was a by-product
of bourgeois idealism. And then the people were much
rather the subject of certain of their works than their
chosen public. Hugo, to be sure, had the rare fortune of
penetrating everywhere. He was one of the only, perhaps
the only one of our writers who was really popular. But the

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others had incurred the hostility of the bourgeoisie with-
out creating a working-class public in compensation. To
convince oneself of this fact all one need do is compare the
importance which the bourgeois University accorded to
Michelet, an authentic genius and a prose- writer of great
class, and to Taine, who was only a cheap pedant, or to
Renan, whose "fine style" offers all the examples you
want of meanness and ugliness. This purgatory in which
the bourgeois class let Michelet vegetate was without
compensation; the "people" that he loved read him for a
while, and then the success of Marxism pushed him into
oblivion. In short, most of these authors were the losers in
a revolution that didn't come off. They attached their
name and their destiny to it. None of them, except Hugo,
really left their mark on literature.

The others, all the others, backed away from the per-
spective of an unclassing from below which would have
made them sink straight down as if a rock had been tied
around their necks. They had no lack of excuses : the time
wasn't ripe, there was no real bond which attached them
to the proletariat, that oppressed class couldn't absorb
their work, it didn't know how much it needed them;
their decision to defend it had remained abstract; what-
ever their sincerity might have been, they had "brooded"
over miseries which they had understood with their head
without feeling them in their heart. Fallen from their
class of origin, haunted by the memory of an affluence
which they should have refused to accept, they ran the
risk of forming "a white-collar proletariat" on the margin
of the real proletariat, suspect to the workers and spurned
by the bourgeois, whose demands had been dictated by

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

bitterness and resentment rather than large-mindedness
and who had ended by turning against both groups/
Besides, in the eighteenth century, the necessary lib-
erties required by literature were not distinguished from
the political liberties which the citizen wanted to win;
all that was necessary for the writer to become a revolu-
tionary was to explore the arbitrary essence of his art and
to make himself the interpreter of its formal demands;
when the revolution which was in the making was bour-
geois, literature was naturally revolutionary because the
first discovery which it made of itself revealed to it its
connections with political democracy. But the formal
liberties which the essayist, the novelist, and the poet were
to defend had nothing in common with the deeper needs
of the proletariat. The latter was not dreaming of de-
manding political freedom, which, after all, it did enjoy,
and which was only a mystification. 2 As for freedom of
thought, for the time being the proletariat was not con-
cerned with it. What it asked for was quite different from
these abstract liberties. It wanted the material improve-
ment of its lot, and more deeply, and more obscurely too,
the end of man's exploitation by man. We shall see later
that these demands were of the same kind made by the
art of writing conceived as a concrete and historical
phenomenon; that is, as the particular and timely appeal
which, by agreeing to historicize himself, a man launches
in regard to all mankind to the men of his time.

1. This was somewhat the case of Ju ; es Valles, though a natural magnanim-
ity constantly struggled within him against bitterness.

2. I am not unaware that workers defended political democracy against
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte much more than did the bourgeois, but that wa
because they thought that by means of it they would be able to bring about
structural reforms.

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But in the nineteenth century literature had just dis-
engaged itself from religious ideology and refused to serve
bourgeois ideology. Thus, it set itself up as being, in princi-
ple, independent of any sort of ideology. As a result, it
retained its abstract aspect of pure negativity. It had not
yet understood that it was itself ideology; it wore itself out
asserting its autonomy, which no one contested. This
amounted to saying that it claimed it had no privileged
subject and could treat any matter whatever. There was
no doubt about the fact that one might write felicitously
about the condition of the working class; but the choice
of this subject depended upon circumstances, upon a free
decision of the artist. One day one might talk about a
provincial bourgeoise, another day, about Carthaginian
mercenaries. From time to time, a Flaubert would affirm
the identity of form and content, but he drew no prac-
tical conclusion from it. Like all his contemporaries, he
drew his definition of beauty from what the Winckel-
manns and Lessings had said almost a hundred years
earlier and which in one way or other boiled down to
presenting it as multiplicity in unity. It was a matter of
capturing the iridescence of the various and imposing a
strict unity upon it by means of style. The "artistic style"
of the Goncourts had no other meaning. It was a formal
method of unifying and embellishing any materials, even
the most beautiful. How could anyone have then con-
ceived that there might be an internal relationship be-
tween the demands of the lower classes and the princi-
ples of the art of writing? Proudhon seems to have been
the only one to have surmised it. And of course Marx.
But they were not men of letters. Literature, still com-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

pletely absorbed by the discovery of its autonomy, was to
itself its own subject. It had passed to the reflective pe-
riod; it tried out its methods, broke its former molds, and
tried to determine experimentally its own laws and to
forge new techniques. It advanced step by step toward the
current forms of the drama and the novel, free verse,
and the criticism of language. Had it discovered a specific
content, it would have had to tear itself away from its
meditation on itself and derive its esthetic norms from
the nature of this content.

At the same time, by choosing to write for a virtual
public, authors would have had to adapt their art to the
capacities of the readers, which would have amounted to
determining it according to external demands and not
according to its own essence. It would have had to give
up some of the exquisite forms of narrative, poetry, and
even reasoning, for the sole reason that they would be
inaccessible to readers without culture. It seemed, there-
fore, that literature would be running the risk of relapsing
into alienation. Hence, the writer, in all honesty, refused
to enslave literature to a public and a determined sub-
ject. But he did not perceive the divorce which was tak-
ing place between the concrete revolution trying to be
born and the abstract games he was indulging in. This
time it was the masses who wanted power, and as the
masses had no culture or leisure, any would-be literary
revolution, by refining its technique, put the works it in-
spired out of their range and served the interests of social
conservatism.

Thus, he had to revert to the bourgeois public. The

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writer tried hard to break all relations with it, but by re-
fusing to be unclassed from below, his break was con-
demned to remain symbolic; he played at it tirelessly; he
showed it by his clothes, his food, the way he furnished
his home, and the manners he adopted, but he did not
do it. It was the bourgeoisie which read him. It was the
bourgeoisie alone which maintained him and decided his
fame. In vain did he pretend that he was getting per-
spective in order to consider it as a whole. Had he wanted
to judge it, he would first have had to leave it, and there
was no other way to leave it than by trying out the
interests and way of life of another class. Since he did not
bring himself to do this, he lived in a state of contra-
diction and dishonesty since he both knew and did not
want to know for whom he was writing. He was fond of
speaking of his solitude, and rather than assume responsi-
bility for the public which he had slyly chosen, he con-
cocted the notion that one writes for himself alone or for
God. He made of writing a metaphysical occupation, a
prayer, an examination of conscience, everything but a
communication. He frequently likened himself to one
possessed, because, if he vomited forth words under the
sway of an inner necessity, at least he was not giving them.
But that did not keep him from carefully polishing his
writings. And moreover, he was so far from wishing harm
to the bourgeoisie that he did not even dispute its right
to govern.

Quite the contrary. Flaubert recognized its right and
mentioned it by name, and his correspondence after the
Commune, which frightened him so, abounds in disgrace-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

ful abuse of the workers. 1 And, as the artist, submerged in
his milieu, was unable to judge it from without, as his re-
jections were ineffectual states of mind, he did not even
notice that the bourgeoisie was an oppressing class ; in fact,
he did not at all consider it as a class, but rather as a
natural species, and if he ventured to describe it, he did so
in strictly psychological terms.

Thus the bourgeois writer and the damned (maudit]
writer moved on the same level; their only difference
was that the first practised white psychology and the sec-

1. I have so often been accused of being unfair to Flaubert that I cannot
resist the pleasure of quoting the following texts which anyone can verify
in the correspondence:

"Neo-catholicism on one hand and socialism on the other have stultified
France. Everything moves between the Immaculate Conception and the work-
ers* lunch-boxes" (1868).

"The first remedy would be to put an end to universal suffrage, the shame
of the human mind" (September 1871).

"I'm worth twenty Croisset voters" (1871).

"I have no hatred for the communards for the reason that I don't hate mad
dogs" (Croisset, Thursday, 1871).

"I believe that the crowd, the herd, will always be hateful. The only ones
important are a small group of spirits, always the same, who pass the torch
from hand to hand" (Croisset, September 8, 1871).

"As to the Commune, which is on its last legs, it's the last manifestation
of the Middle Ages."

"I hate democracy (at least what it is taken to mean in France), that is,
the exaltation of grace to the detriment of justice, the negation of law, in
short, anti-sociability."

"The Commune re-instates murderers."

"The people is an eternal minor, and it will always be at the bottom of
the scale since it is number, mass, the unbounded."

"It's not important for a lot of peasants to know how to read and no longer
listen to their priest, but it's infinitely important that a lot of men like Renan
or Littr6 live and be listened to. Our salvation is now in a legitimate aris-
tocracy. I mean by that a majority which will be composed of something other
than mere figures." (1871).

"Do you believe that if France, instead of being governed, in short, by the
mob, were in the power of the mandarins, we would be in this mess? If, in-
stead of having wanted to enlighten the lower classes, we had been con-
cerned with educating the upper ones?" (Croisset, Wednesday, August 3rd,
1870).

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ond, black psychology. For example, when Flaubert de-
clared that he called "anyone who thought basely bour-
geois, 5 ' he was defining the bourgeois in psychological
and idealistic terms, that is, in the perspective of the
ideology which he pretended to reject. As a result, he
rendered a signal service to the bourgeoisie. He led back
to the fold the rebellious and the maladjusted, who might
have gone over to the proletariat, by convincing them that
one could cast off the bourgeois in himself by a simple
inner discipline. All they had to do was to practice high
thinking in private and they could continue to enjoy their
goods and prerogatives with a peaceful conscience. They
could still live in bourgeois fashion, and enjoy their in-
comes in bourgeois fashion, and frequent bourgeois draw-
ing-rooms, but that would all be nothing but appearance.
They had raised themselves above their kind by the
nobility of their feelings. By the same token he taught
his confreres the trick which could allow them, at any
rate, to maintain a good conscience; for magnanimity
finds its most fitting practice in the practice of the arts.
The solitude of the artist was doubly a fake : it covered
up not only a real relationship with the great public but
also the restoration of an audience of specialists. Since the
government of men and goods was abandoned to the
bourgeoisie, the spiritual was once again separated from
the temporal. A sort of priesthood once again sprang up.
Stendhal's public was Balzac, Baudelaire's was Barbey
d'Aurevilly; and Baudelaire, in turn, made himself the
public of Poe. These literary salons took on a vague col-
legiate atmosphere; one "talked literature" in a hushed
voice, with an infinite respect; one debated whether the

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

musician derived more aesthetic joy from his music than
the writer from his books. Art again became sacred to the
extent that it turned aside from life. It even set up for
itself a sort of communion of saints; one joined hands
across the centuries with Cervantes, Rabelais, and Dante.
One identified himself with this monastic society. The
priesthood, instead of being a concrete and, so to speak,
geographical organism, became a hereditary institution,
a club, all of whose members were dead except one, the
last in point of time, who represented the others upon
earth and who epitomized the whole college.

These new believers, who had their saints in the past,
also had their future life. The divorce of the temporal
and spiritual led to a deep modification of the idea of
glory. From the time of Racine on, it had been not so
much the revenge of the misunderstood writer as the nat-
ural prolongation of success in an immutable society. In
the nineteenth century it functioned as a mechanism of
overcompensation. "I shall be understood in 1880," "I
shall win my trial on appeal; 55 these famous words prove
that the writer had not lost the desire to practise a direct
and universal action within the framework of an inte-
grated collectivity. But as this action was not possible in
the present, one projected into an indefinite future the
compensatory myth of a reconciliation between the writer
and his public. Moreover, all this remained quite vague;
none of these lovers of glory asked himself in what sort of
society he would be able to find his recompense. They
merely took pleasure in dreaming that their great-nephews
would profit from an internal betterment for having come
at a later time into an older world. That was the way

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Baudelaire, who didn't worry about contradictions, often
dressed his wounded pride, by considering his posthumous
renown, although he held that society had entered a pe-
riod of decadence which would end only with the disap-
pearance of the human race.

Thus, for the present, the writer relied on an audience
of specialists ; as for the past, he concluded a mystic pact
with the great dead ; as to the future, he made use of the
myth of glory. He neglected nothing in wrenching him-
self free from his class. He was up in the air, a stranger to
his century, out of his element, damned. All this play-
acting had but one goal : to integrate himself into a sym-
bolic society which would be like an image of the aris-
tocracy of the old regime. Psychoanalysis is familiar with
these processes of identification of which artistic think-
ing offers numerous examples : the sick person who needs
the key of the asylum in order to escape and finally comes
to believe that he himself is the key. Thus, the writer,
who needed the favor of the great to unclass himself,
ended by taking himself for the incarnation of the whole
nobility, and as the latter was characterized by its parasit-
ism it was the ostentation of parasitism which he chose for
his style of living. He made himself the martyr of pure
consumption. As we have pointed out, he saw no objec-
tion to using the goods of the bourgeoisie, but on condi-
tion that he was to spend them, that is, transform them
into unproductive and useless objects. He burned them, so
to speak, because fire purifies everything. Moreover, as
he was not always rich, and as he had to live well, he
composed a strange life for himself, both extravagant and
needy, in which a calculated improvidence symbolized the

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

mad liberality which was denied him. Outside of art, he
found nobility in only three kinds of occupation. First,
in love, because it is a useless passion and because women,
as Nietzsche said, are the most dangerous game. Also in
travel, because the traveler is a perpetual witness who
passes from one society to another without ever remain-
ing in any because as a foreign consumer in an industrious
collectivity, he is the very image of parasitism. Sometimes,
in war too, because it is an immense consumption of men
and goods.

The contempt with which trade was regarded in aris-
tocratic and warlike societies was again met with in the
writer. He was not satisfied with being useless, like the
courtiers of the Old Regime; he wanted to be able to
trample on utilitarian work, to smash it, burn it, damage
it; he wanted to imitate the unconstraint of the lords who
had their hunting parties ride across the ripe wheat. He
cultivated in himself those destructive impulses of which
Baudelaire has spoken in The Glass-maker. A little later
he was to have a particular liking for instruments which
were defective, worthless or no longer in use, half re-
trieved by nature, and which were like caricatures of
instrumentality. It was not a rare thing for him to con-
sider his own life as a tool to be destroyed. In any event,
he risked it and played to lose: alcohol, drugs, everything
served his purpose. The height of uselessness, of course,
was beauty. From "art for art's sake" to symbolism, in-
cluding realism and the Parnassians, all schools agreed
that art was the highest form of pure consumption. It
taught nothing, it reflected no ideology, and above all, it
refrained from moralizing. Long before Gide wrote it,

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Flaubert, Gautier, the Goncourts, Renard, and Maupas-
sant had in their own way said that "it is with good
sentiments that one produces bad literature."

For some, literature was subjectivity carried to the ab-
solute, a bonfire in which the black vines of their suffer-
ings and vices writhed and twisted. Lying at the bottom
of a world as in a dungeon, they passed beyond it and
dispelled it by their dissatisfaction, which revealed other
worlds to them. It seemed to them that their heart was
different enough so that the picture of it which they drew
might be resolutely barren. Others set themselves up as the
impartial witnesses of their age, but nobody noticed that
they were testifying. They raised testimony and witness
to the absolute ; they offered to the empty sky the tableau
of the society about them. Circumvented, transposed, uni-
fied, and caught in the trap of an artistic style, the events
of the universe were neutralized and, so to speak, put
in parentheses; realism was an "epoche." Here impossible
truth joined hands with inhuman Beauty "beautiful as a
marble dream." Neither the author, insofar as he wrote,
nor the reader, insofar as he read, any longer belonged to
this world: they were transformed into pure beholding;
they considered man from without; they strove to see him
from the point of view of God, or, if you like, of the ab-
solute void. But after all, I can still recognize myself in the
purest lyricist's description of his particularities. And if
the experimental novel imitated science, was it not utiliza-
ble as science was? Could it not likewise have its social
applications?

The extremists wished, for fear of being serviceable,
that their works should not even enlighten the reader

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

about his own heart; they refused to transmit their ex
perience. In the last analysis the work would be entirel
gratuitous only if it were entirely inhuman. The logics
conclusion of all this was the hope of an absolute crea
tion, a quintessence of luxury and prodigality, not utiliza
ble in this world because it was not of the world and be
cause it recalled nothing in it. Imagination was conceive*
as an unconditioned faculty of denying the real and th
objet d'art was set up on the collapsing of the universe
There was the heightened artificialism of Des Esseintes
the systematic deranging of all the senses, and finally th<
concerted destruction of language. There was also si
lence: that icy silence, the work of Mallarme or th*
silence of M. Teste for whom all communication was im
pure.

The extreme point of this brilliant and mortal liter
ature was nothingness. Its extreme point and its deepei
essence. There was nothing positive in the new spiritual
ity. It was a pure and simple negation of the temporal
In the Middle Ages it was the temporal which was the
Inessential in relation to spirituality; in the nineteentt
century the opposite occurred: the Temporal was pri-
mary and the spiritual was the inessential parasite whicF
gnawed away at ft and tried to destroy it. It was a ques-
tion of denying the world or consuming it. Of denying
it by consuming it. Flaubert wrote to disentangle himsel]
from men and things. His sentence surrounds the object,
seizes it, immobilizes it and breaks its back, changes into
stone and petrifies the object as well. It is blind and deaf,
without arteries; not a breath of life. A deep silence sep-
arates it from the sentence which follows; it falls into the

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

void, eternally, and drags its prey along in this infinite
fall. Once described, any reality is stricken from the in-
ventory; one moves on to the next. Realism was nothing
else but this great gloomy chase. It was a matter of setting
one's mind at rest before anything else. Wherever one
went, the grass stopped growing. The determinism of the
naturalistic novel crushed out life and replaced human
actions by one-way mechanisms. It had virtually but one
subject: the slow disintegration of a man, an enterprise,
a family, or a society. It was necessary to return to zero.
One took nature in a state of productive disequilibrium
and one wiped out this disequilibrium; one returned to an
equilibrium of death by annulling the forces with which
he was confronted. When, by chance, he shows us the suc-
cess of an ambitious man, it is only appearance; Bel Ami
does not take the strongholds of the bourgeoisie by as-
sault ; he is a gauge whose rise merely testifies to the col-
lapse of a society. And when symbolism discovered the
close relationship between beauty and death, it was
merely making explicit the theme of the whole literature
of a half century. The beauty of the past, because it is
gone; the beauty of young people dying and of flowers
which fade; the beauty of all erosions and all ruins; the
supreme dignity of consumption, of the disease which con-
sumes, of the love which devours, of the art which kills;
death is everywhere, before us, behind us, even in the
sun and the perfumes of the earth. The art of Barres is a
meditation on death : a thing is beautiful only when it is
"consumable, 55 that is, it dies when one has enjoyed it.

The temporal structure which was particularly appro-
priate for these princely games was the moment. Because

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

it passes and because in itself it is the image of eternity,
it is the negation of human time, that three dimensional
time of work and history. A great deal of time is needed
to build; a moment is enough to hurl everything to the
ground. When one considers the work of Gide in this per-
spective, one cannot help seeing in it an ethics strictly re-
served for the writer-consumer. What is his gratuitous act
if not the culmination of a century of bourgeois comedy
and the imperative of the author-gentleman: Philoctete
gives away his bow, the millionaire squanders his bank-
notes, Bernard steals, Lafcadio kills and Menalque sells
his belongings.

This destructive movement was to go to its logical con-
sequence: "The simplest surrealist act," Breton was to
write twenty years later, "consists of going down into the
street, revolver in hand, and firing into the crowd at
random as long as you can." It was the last term of a
long dialectical process. In the eighteenth century liter-
ature had been a negativity; in the reign of the bour-
geoisie it passed on to a state of absolute and hypostasized
Negation. It became a multicolored and glittering process
of annihilation. "Surrealism is not interested in paying
much attention ... to anything whose end is not the an-
nihilation of being and its transformation into an internal
and blind brilliance which is no more the soul of ice than
it is of fire," writes Breton once again. In the end there
is nothing left for literature to do but to contest itself. That
is what it did in the name of surrealism. For seventy years
writers had been working to consume the world; after
1918 one wrote in order to consume literature: one
squandered literary traditions, hashed together words,

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

threw them against each other to make them shatter. Lit-
erature as Negation became Anti-literature; never had it
been more literary: the circle was completed.

During the same time, the writer, in order to imitate
the lighthearted squandering of an aristocracy of birth,
had no greater concern than that of establishing his ir-
responsibility. He began by setting up the rights of genius
which replaced the divine right of the authoritarian mon-
archy. Since Beauty was luxury carried to the extreme,
since it was a pyre with cold flames which lit up and
and consumed everything, since it was fed by all forms
of deterioration and destruction, in particular suffering
and death, the artist, who was its priest, had the right to
demand in its name and to provoke, if need be, the un-
happiness of those close to him. As for him, he had been
burning for a long time; he was in ashes; other victims
were needed to feed the flames. Women in particular:
they would make him suffer and he would pay them back
with interest. He wanted to be able to bring bad luck to
everyone around him. And if there were no means of set-
ting off catastrophes, he would accept offerings. Ad-
mirers, male and female, were there so that he might
set fire to their hearts or spend their money without
gratitude or remorse. Maurice Sachs reports that his
maternal grandfather, who had a fanatical admiration
for Anatole France, spent a fortune furnishing the Villa
Said. When he died, Anatole France uttered this
funeral eulogy: "Too bad! He was decorative." By taking
money from the bourgeois, the writer was practising his
priesthood, since he was diverting a part of their wealth
in order to send it up in smoke. And by the same token

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

he placed himself above all responsibilities : whom could
he be responsible to? And in the name of what? If his
work aimed at constructing, he could be asked to give
an accounting. But since it declared itself to be pure de-
struction, it escaped judgment.

At the end of the century all this remained somewhat
confused and contradictory. But when literature, with sur-
realism, made itself a provocation to murder, one saw the
writer, by a paradoxical but logical sequence, explicitly
setting up the principle of his total irresponsibility. To tell
the truth, he did not make his reasons clear; he took
refuge in the bushes of automatic writing. But the motives
are evident : a parasitic aristocracy of pure consumption,
whose function was to keep burning the goods of an in-
dustrious and productive society, could not come under
the jurisdiction of the collectivity he was destroying. And
as this systematic destruction never went any further than
scandal, this amounted in the last analysis, to saying that
the primary duty of the writer was to provoke scandal
and that his inalienable right was to escape its con-
sequences.

The bourgeoisie let him carry on; it smiled at these
monkey shines. What did it matter if the writer scorned
it? This scorn wouldn't lead to anything since the bour-
geoisie was his only public. It was the only one to whom
he spoke about it; it was a secret between them; in a
way, it was the bond which united them. And even if he
won the popular audience, what likelihood was there of
stirring up the discontent of the masses by showing that
bourgeois thinking was contemptible? There was not the
slightest chance that a doctrine of absolute consumption

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could fool the working classes. Besides, the bourgeoisie
knew very well that the writer secretly took its part: he
needed it for his aesthetic of opposition and resentment;
it provided him with the goods he consumed; he wanted
to preserve the social order so that he could feel that as a
stranger there he was a permanent fixture. In short, he
was a rebel, not a revolutionary.

As for rebels, they were right in the bourgeoisie's line.
In a sense, it even became their accomplice; it was better
to keep the forces of negation within a vain aestheticism, a
rebellion without effect; if they were free, they might have
interested themselves on behalf of the oppressed classes.
And then, bourgeois readers understood, in their way,
what the writer called the gratuity of his work; for the
latter this was the very essence of spirituality and the
heroic manifestation of his break with the temporal; for
the former a gratuitous work was fundamentally inoffen-
sive; it was an amusement. They doubtless preferred the
literature of Bordeaux and Bourget but they did not
think that it was bad if there were useless books; they
distracted the mind from serious preoccupations; they
provided it with the recreation it needed for its general
well-being. Thus, even while recognizing that the work
of art could serve no purpose, the bourgeois public still
found means of utilizing it.

The writer's success was built upon this misunderstand-
ing; as he rejoiced in being misunderstood, it was normal
for his readers to be mistaken. Since literature had be-
come in his hands an abstract negation which fed on it-
self, he must have expected them to smile at his most
cutting insults and say "it's only literature; 55 and since it

135

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

was a pure contestation of the spirit of seriousness, he
must have been pleased that they refused on principle to
take him seriously. Thus, they found themselves, even
though it was with scandal and without quite realizing it,
in the most "nihilistic" works of the age. The reason was
that even though the writer might have put all his ef-
forts into concealing his readers from himself, he could
never completely escape their insidious influence. A
shame-faced bourgeois, writing for bourgeois without ad-
mitting it to himself, he was able to launch the maddest
ideas; the ideas were often only bubbles which popped up
on the surface of his mind. But his technique betrayed him
because he did not watch over it with the same zeal. It ex-
pressed a deeper and truer choice, an obscure metaphysic,
a genuine relationship with contemporary society. What-
ever the cynicism and the bitterness of the chosen sub-
ject, nineteenth-century narrative technique offered the
French public a reassuring image of the bourgeoisie. Our
authors, to be sure, inherited it, but they were responsible
for having perfected it.

Its appearance, which dates from the end of the Middle
Ages, coincided with the first reflective meditation by
which the novelist became conscious of his art. At first
he told his story without putting himself on the stage
or meditating on his function because the subjects of his
tales were almost always of folk or, at any rate, collective
origin, and he limited himself to making use of them. The
social character of the matter he worked with as well as
the fact that it existed before he came to be concerned
with it conferred upon him the role of intermediary and
was enough to justify him; he was the man who knew

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FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

the most charming stories and who, instead of telling
them orally, set them down in writing. He invented little ;
he gave them style; he was the historian of the imaginary.
When he himself started contriving the fiction which he
published, he found himself. He discovered simultaneously
his almost guilty solitude and unjustifiable gratuity, the
subjectivity of literary creation. In order to mask them
from the eyes of others and from his own as well, in
order to establish his right to tell these stories, he wanted
to give his inventions the appearance of truth. Lacking
the power to preserve the almost material opacity which
characterized them when they emanated from the col-
lective imagination, he pretended that at least they did
not originate with him, and he managed to give them
out as memories. To do that he had represented himself
in his works by means of a narrator of oral tradition and at
the same time he inserted into them a fictitious audience
which represented his real public, such as the characters
in the Decameron whom their temporary exile puts cu-
riously in the position of learned people and who in turn
take up the role of narrator, audience, and critic. Thus,
after the age of objective and metaphysical realism, when
the words of the tale were taken for the very things
which they named and when its substance was the uni-
verse, there came that of literary idealism in which the
word has existence only in someone's mouth or on some-
one's pen and refers back in essence to a speaker to whose
presence it bears witness, where the substance of the tales
is the subjectivity which perceives and thinks the uni-
verse, and where the novelist, instead of putting the reader
directly into contact with the object, has become con-

137

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

scious of his role of mediator and embodies the media-
tion in a fictitious recital.

Since that time the chief characteristic of the story
which one gives to the public has been that of being al-
ready thought, that is, achieved, set in order, pruned, and
clarified; or rather, of yielding itself only through the
thoughts which one retrospectively forms about it. That is
why the tense of the novel is almost always the past,
whereas that of the epic, which is of collective origin, is
frequently the present.

Passing from Boccaccio to Cervantes and then to the
French novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies, the proceedings grow complicated and become epi-
sodic because the novel picks up along the way and in-
corporates the satire, the fable, and the character sketch. 1
The novelist appears in the first chapter; he announces,
he questions his readers, admonishes them, and assures
them of the truth of his story. I shall call this "primary
subjectivity/ 5 Then, secondary characters intervene along
the way, characters whom the narrator has met and who
interrupt the course of the plot to tell the story of their
own misfortunes. These are the "secondary subjectivities"
supported and restored by the primary subjectivity. Thus,
certain stories are re-thought and intellectualized to the
second degree. 2 The readers never experience the direct

1. In The Devil on Two Sticks, for example, Le Sage novelizes the char-
acters of La Bniyere and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld; that is, he binds
them together by the slender thread of a plot.

2. The procedure of writing the novel in the form of letters is only a varia-
tion of what I have just indicated. The letter is the subjective recital of an
event; it refers back to the one who wrote it and who becomes both actor and
witnessing subjectivity. As to the event itself, although it is recent, it is already
re-thought and explained: the letter always supposes a lag between the fact
(which belongs to a recent past) and its recital, which is given subsequently
and in a moment of leisure.

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onrush of the event; if the narrator has been surprised by
it at the moment of its occurrence, he does not com-
municate his surprise to them; he simply informs them
of it. As to the novelist, since he is convinced that the only
reality of the word lies in its being said, since he lives in
a polite century in which there still exists an art of con-
versation, he introduces conversationalists into his book
in order to justify the words which are read there; but
since it is by words that he represents the characters whose
function is to talk, he does not escape the vicious circle. 1
Of course, the authors of the nineteenth century
brought their efforts to bear on the narration of the event.
They tried to restore part of its freshness and violence,
but for the most part they again took up the idealistic
technique and adapted it to their needs. Authors as dis-
similar as Barbey d'Aurevilly and Fromentin make use of
it constantly. In Dominique, for example, one finds a
primary subjectivity which manipulates the levels of a
secondary subjectivity and it is the latter which makes
the tale. The procedure is nowhere more manifest than
in Maupassant. The structure of his short stories is al-
most invariable ; we are first presented with the audience,
a brilliant and worldly society which has assembled in a
drawing-room after dinner. It is night-time, which dispels
fatigue and passion. The oppressed are asleep, as are the
rebellious; the world is enshrouded; the story unfolds.
In a bubble of light surrounded by nothing there remains
this elite which stays awake, completely occupied with its

1. This is the reverse of the vicious circle of the surrealists who try to de-
stroy painting by painting. In this case one wants to have literature's letters
of credit given by literature.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

ceremonies. If there are intrigues or love or hate among
its members, we are not told of them, and desire and
anger are likewise stilled; these men and women are
occupied in preserving their culture and manners and in
recognizing each other by the rites of politeness. They
represent order in its most exquisite form; the calm of
night, the silence of the passions, everything concurs in
symbolizing the stable bourgeoisie of the end of the cen-
tury which thinks that nothing more will happen and
which believes in the eternity of capitalist organization.
Thereupon, the narrator is introduced. He is a middle-
aged man who has "seen much, read much, and retained
much, 53 a professional man of experience, a doctor, a mil-
itary man, an artist, or a Don Juan. He has reached the
time of life when, according to a respectful and com-
fortable myth, man is freed from the passions and con-
siders with an indulgent lucidity those he has experienced.
His heart is calm, like the night. He tells his story with
detachment. If it has caused him suffering, he has made
honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and con-
siders it as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis.
There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended
long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted.
Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is
over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and
wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Or-
der triumphs; order is everywhere; it contemplates an
old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have
preserved the memory of the ripples which have run
through it. Moreover, had there even been this dis-
turbance? The evocation of an abrupt change would

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frighten this bourgeois sociey. Neither the general nor
the doctor confides his recollections in the raw state;
they are experiences from which they have extracted the
quintessence, and they warn us, from the moment they
start talking, that their tale has a moral. Besides, the
story is explanatory; it aims at producing a psychological
law on the basis of this example. A law, or, as Hegel says,
the calm image of change. And the change itself, that is,
the individual aspect of the anecdote, is it not an ap-
pearance? To the extent that one explains it, one reduces
the entire effect to the entire cause, the unforeseen to
the expected and the new to the old. The narrator brings
the same workmanship to bear upon the human event as,
according to Myerson, the nineteenth-century scientist
brought to bear upon the scientific fact. He reduces the
diverse to the identical. And if, from time to time, he
maliciously desires to maintain a slightly disquieting tone
in his story, he dispenses the irreducibility of the change
most carefully, as in those fantastic tales in which, behind
the inexplicable, the author allows us to suspect a whole
causal order which will restore rationality in the uni-
verse. Thus, for the novelist who is a product of this
stabilized society change is a non-being, as it is for Par-
menides, as Evil is for ClaudeL Moreover, even should it
exist, it would never be anything else than an individual
calamity in a maladjusted soul.

It is not a question of studying the relative movements
of partial systems within a system in motion society,
the universe but of considering from the viewpoint
of absolute rest the absolute movement of a relatively
isolated partial system. That is, one sets up absolute

141

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

landmarks in order to determine it, and consequently
one knows it in its absolute truth. In an ordered so-
ciety which meditates upon its eternity and celebrates
it with rites, a man evokes the phantom of a past dis-
easiness, dispels it with a wave of his magic wand and
order, makes it glitter, embellishes it with old-fashioned
graces, and at the moment when he is about to cause un-
substitutes for it the eternal hierarchy of causes and laws.
In this magician who frees himself from history and life
by understanding them and who is raised above his au-
dience by his knowledge and experience we recognize the
loftly aristocrat whom we spoke about earlier. 1

If we have spoken at some length about Maupassant's
narrative procedure it is because it constituted the basic
technique for all the French novelists of his own genera-
tion, of the succeeding one, and of all the generations
since. The internal narrator is always present. He may
reduce himself to an abstraction; often he is not even ex-
plicitly designated; but, at any rate, it is through his sub-
jectivity that we perceive the event. When he does not
appear at all, it is not that he has been suppressed like
a useless device; it is that he has become the alter ego of
the author. The latter, with his blank sheet of paper in
front of him, sees his imagination transmuted into ex-
periences. He no longer writes in his own name but at the
dictation of a mature and sober man who has witnessed
the circumstances which are being related.

1. When Maupassant writes Le Horla, that is, when he speaks of the mdd-
ness which threatens him, the tone changes. It is because at last something
something horrible is going to happen. The man is overwhelmed, crushed ;
he no longer understands; he wants to drag the reader along with him into
his terror. But the twig is bent; lacking a technique adapted to madness,
death, and history, he fails to move the reader.

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Daudet, for example, obviously had the mind of a
drawing-room raconteur who infuses into his style the
twists and friendly casualness of worldly conversation,
who exclaims, grows ironical, questions, and challenges
his audience: "Ah! how disappointed Tartarin was! And
do you know why? You won't guess in a million years! 55
Even realistic writers who wished to be the objective his-
torians of their time preserved the abstract scheme of the
method; that is, in all their novels there is a common
milieu, a common plot, which is not the individual and
historical subjectivity of the novelist but the ideal and
universal one of the man of experience. First of all, the
tale is laid in the past: the ceremonial past, in order to
put some distance between the events and the audience;
the subjective past, equivalent to the memory of the story-
teller; the social past, since the plot does not belong to
that history without conclusion which is in the making but
to history already made.

If it is true, as Janet claims, that memory is distin-
guished from the somnambulistic resurrection of the past
in that the latter reproduces the event, whereas the
former, indefinitely compressible, can be told in a phrase
or a volume, according to need, it can well be said that
novels of this kind, with their abrupt contractions of
time followed by long expansions, are precisely memories.
Sometimes the novelist lingers to describe a decisive mo-
ment; at other times he leaps across several years: "Three
years flowed by, three years of gloomy suffering. . ." He
permits himself to shed light on his characters' present
by means of their future: "They did not think at the
time that this brief encounter was to have fatal conse-

143

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

quences. . ." And from his point of view he is not wrong,
since this present and future are both past, since the
time of memory has lost its irreversibility and one can
cross it backward and forward.

Besides, the memories which he gives us, already worked
upon, thought over, and appraised, offer us an immedi-
ately assimilable teaching; the feelings and actions are
often presented to us as typical examples of the laws of the
heart: "Daniel, like all young people...," "Eve was
quite feminine in that she . . .," "Mercier had the nasty
habit, common among civil-service clerks . . ." And as
these laws cannot be deduced a priori nor grasped by in-
tuition nor founded on experimentation which is scientific
and capable of being universally reproduced, they refer
the reader back to a subjectivity which has produced
these recipes from the circumstances of an active life.
In this sense it can be said that most of the French novels
of the Third Republic aspired, whatever the age of
their real author and much more so if the author was
very young, to the honor of having been written by
quinquagenarians.

During this whole period, which extends over several
generations, the plot is related from the point of view of
the absolute, that is, of order. It is a local change in a
system at rest; neither the author nor the reader runs any
risk; there is no surprise to be feared; the event is a thing
of the past; it has been catalogued and understood. In a
stable society which is not yet conscious of the dangers
which threaten it, which has a morality at its disposal, a
scale of values, and a system of explanations to integrate
its local changes, which is convinced that it is beyond

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historicity and that nothing important will ever happen
any more, in a bourgeois France tilled to the last acre,
laid out like a checkerboard by its secular walls, con-
gealed in its industrial methods, and resting on the glory
of its Revolution, no other fictional technique could be
possible. New methods that some writers attempted to
introduce were successful only as curiosities or were not
followed up. Neither writers, readers, the structure of the
collectivity, nor its myths had any need of them. 1

Thus, whereas literature ordinarily represents an in-
tegrating and militant function in society, bourgeois so-
ciety at the end of the nineteenth century offers the un-
precedented spectacle of an industrious society, grouped
around the banner of production, from which there issues
a literature which, far from reflecting it, never speaks
to it about what interests it, runs counter to its ideology,
identifies the Beautiful with the unproductive, refuses to

1. Among these procedures I shall first cite the curious recourse to the style
of the theatre that one finds at the end of the last century and the beginning
of this one in Gyp, Lavedan, Abel Hermant, etc. The novel was written in
dialogue form. The gestures of the characters and their actions were indicated
in italics and parenthetically. It was evidently a matter of making the readei
contemporaneous with the action as the spectator is during the performance.
This procedure certainly manifests the predominance of dramatic art in polite
society around 1900. In its way it also sought to escape the myth of primary
subjectivity. But the fact that it was abandoned shows sufficiently that it did
not solve the problem. First, it is a sign of weakness to ask for help from a
neighboring art, a proof that one lacks resources in the very domain of the
art he practices. Then, the author did not thereby keep from entering into the
consciousness of his characters and having the reader enter with him. He
simply divulged the intimate contents of the consciousness in parentheses and
italics, with the style and typographical procedures that are generally used for
stage directions. In effect, it was an attempt without a future. The authors
who used it had a vague feeling that new life could be put into the novel
by writing it in the present. But they had not yet understood that it was
not possible if one did not first give up the explanatory attitude.

More serious was the attempt to introduce the interior monologue of Schnitz-

145

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

allow itself to be integrated, and does not even wish to
be read.

The authors are not to be blamed; they did what they
could; among them are some of our greatest and purest
writers. And besides, as every kind of human behavior
discloses to us an aspect of the universe, their attitude
has enriched us despite themselves by revealing gratuity
as one of the infinite dimensions of the world and as a
possible goal of human activity. And as they were art-
ists, their work covered up a desperate appeal to the free-
dom of the reader they pretended to despise. It pushed
contestation to the limit, even to the point of contesting
itself; it gives us a glimpse of a black silence beyond the
massacre of words, and, beyond the spirit of seriousness,
the bare and empty sky of equivalences; it invites us to
emerge into nothingness by destruction of all myths and all

ler (I am not speaking here of that of Joyce which has quite different meta-
physical principles. Larbaud, who, I know, harks back to Joyce, seems to me
much rather to draw his inspiration from Les Lauriers sont coup&s and from
Mademoiselle Else). In short, it was a matter of pushing the hypothesis of a
primary subjectivity to the limit and of passing on to realism by leading
idealism up to the absolute.

The reality which one shows to the reader without intermediary is no longer
the thing itself the tree, the ashtray but the consciousness which sees
the thing; the "real" is no longer only a representation, but rather the rep-
resentation becomes an absolute reality since it is given to us as an immediate
datum. The inconvenient aspect of this procedure is that it encloses us in an
individual subjectivity and that it thereby lacks the intermonadic universe;
besides, it dilutes the event and the action in the perception of one and then
the other. Now, the common characteristic of the fact and the action is that
they escape subjective representation which grasps their results but not theii
living movement. In short, it is only with a certain amount of faking that
one reduces the stream of consciousness to a succession of words, even de-
formed ones. If the word is given as an intermediary signifying a reality
which in essence transcends language, nothing could be better; it with-
draws itself, is forgotten, and discharges consciousness upon the object.

But if it presents itself as the psychic reality, if the author, by writing,

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scales of value; it discloses to us in man a close and secret
relationship with the nothing, instead of the intimate
relationship with the divine transcendence. It is the liter-
ature of adolescence, of that age when the young man,
useless and w r ithout responsibility, still supported and fed
by his parents, wastes his family's money, passes judgment
on his father, and takes part in the demolition of the
serious universe which protected his childhood. If one
bears in mind that the festival, as Caillois has well shown,
is one of those negative moments when the collectivity
consumes the goods it has accumulated, violates the laws
of its moral code, spends for the pleasure of spending, and
destroys for the pleasure of destroying, it will be seen that
literature in the nineteenth century was, on the margin
of the industrious society which had the mystique of sav-
ing, a great sumptuous and funereal festival, an invitation

claims to give us an ambiguous reality which is a sign, objective in es-
sence that is, insofar as it relates to something outside itself and a
thing, formal in essence that is, as an immediate psychic datum then he
can be accused of not having participated and of disregarding the rhetorical
law which might be formulated as follows: in literature, where one uses
signs, it is not necessary to use only signs; and if the reality which one wants
to signify is one word, it must be given to the reader by other words. He can
be charged, besides, with having forgotten that the greatest riches of the
psychic life are silent. We know what has happened to the internal mono-
logue; having become rhetoric^ that is, a poetic transposition of the inner
life silent as well as verbal it has today become one method among
others of the novelist. Too idealistic to be true, too realistic to be complete,
it is the crown of the subjectivistic technique. It is within and by means of
this technique that the literature of to-day has become conscious of itself,
that is, that literature is a double surpassing, toward the objective and toward
the rhetorical, of the technique of the internal monologue. But for that it
is necessary that the historical circumstance change.

It is evident that the writer continues to-day to write in the past tense. It
is not by changing the tense of the verb but by revolutionizing the techniques
of the story that he will succeed in making the reader contemporary with the
etory.

147

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

to burn in a splendid immorality, in the fire of the pas-
sions, even unto death. When I come to say later on that
it found its belated fulfillment and its end in Trotskyising
surrealism, one will better understand the function it as-
sumes in a too closed society : it was a safety value. After
all, it's not so far from the perpetual holiday to the per-
manent revolution.

However, the nineteenth century was the time of the
writer's transgression and fall. Had he accepted unclassing
from below and had he given his art a content, he would
have carried on with other means and on another plane
the undertaking of his predecessors. He might have helped
literature pass from negativity and abstraction to concrete
construction; without losing the autonomy which the;
eighteenth century had won for it and which there was
no longer any question of taking away from it, it might
have again integrated itself into society; by clarifying and
supporting the claims of the proletariat, he would have
attained the essence of the art of writing and would have
understood that there is a coincidence not only between
formal freedom of thought and political democracy, but
also between the material obligation of choosing man as a
perpetual subject of meditation and social democracy.
His style would have regained an inner tension because
he would have been addressing a split public. By trying
to awaken the consciousness of the working class while
giving evidence to the bourgeois of their own iniquity, his
works would have reflected the entire world. He would
have learned to distinguish generosity, the original source
of the work of art, the unconditioned appeal to the reader,
from prodigality, its caricature ; he would have abandoned

148

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

the analytical and psychological interpretation of "human
nature" for the synthetic appreciation of conditions.
Doubtless it was difficult, perhaps impossible; but he went
about it the wrong way. It was not necessary for him to get
on his high horse in a vain effort to escape all class de-
termination, nor to "brood over 55 the proletariat, but on
the contrary to think of himself as a bourgeois who had
broken loose from his class and who was united with the
oppressed masses by a solidarity of interest.

The sumptuousness of the means of expression which
he discovered should not make us forget that he betrayed
literature. But his responsibility goes even further; if the
authors had found an audience in the oppressed classes,
perhaps the divergence of their points of view and the
diversity of their writings would have helped produce in
the masses what someone has very happily called a move-
ment of ideas, that is, an open, contradictory, and dialect-
ical ideology. Without doubt, Marxism would have tri-
umphed, but it would have been colored with a thousand
nuances; it would have had to absorb rival doctrines,
digest them, and remain open. We know what happened;
two revolutionary ideologies instead of a hundred : before
1870, the Prudhonians in the majority in the Interna-
tional, then crushed by the defeat of the Commune; Marx-
ism triumphing over its adversary not by the power of
the Hegelian negativity which preserves while it surpasses,
but because external forces pure and simple suppressed
one of the forms of the antinomy. It would take a long
time to tell all that this triumph without glory has cost
Marxism; for want of contradiction, it has lost life. Had it
been the better, constantly combatted, transforming it-

149

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

self in order to win, stealing its enemies' arms, it might
have been identified with mind; alone, it became the
Church, while the gentlemen-writers, a thousand miles
away, made themselves guardians of an abstract spir-
ituality.

Will anyone doubt that I am aware how incomplete
and debatable these analyses are? Exceptions abound, and
I know them, but it would take a big book to go into them.
I have touched only the high spots. But above all, one
should understand the spirit in which I have undertaken
this work. If one were to see in it an attempt, even super-
ficial, at sociological explanation, it would lose all signif-
icance. Just as for Spinoza, the idea of a line segment ro-
tating about one of its extremities remains abstract and
false if one considers it outside of the synthetic, concrete,
and bounded idea of circumference which contains, com-
pletes, and justifies it, likewise here, the considerations re-
main arbitrary if they are not replaced in the perspective
of a work of art, that is, of a free and unconditioned ap-
peal to a freedom. One cannot write without a public and
without a myth without a certain public which histor-
ical circumstances have made, without a certain myth of
literature which depends to a very great extent upon the
demand of this public. In a word, the author is in a situa-
tion, like all other men. But his writings, like every hu-
man project, simultaneously enclose, specify, and surpass
this situation, even explain it and set it up, just as the
idea of a circle explains and sets up that of the rotation of
a segment.

Being situated is an essential and necessary character-
istic of freedom. To describe the situation is not to cast

150

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

aspersion on the freedom. The Jansenist ideology, the law
of the three unities, and the rules of French prosody are
not art; in regard to art they are even pure nothingness,
since they can by no means produce, by a simple combina-
tion, a good tragedy, a good scene, or even a good line. But
the art of Racine had to be invented on the basis of these;
not by conforming to them, as has been rather foolishly
said, and by deriving exquisite difficulties and necessary
constraints from them, but rather by re-inventing them,
by conferring a new and peculiarly Racinian function
upon the division into acts, the cesura, rhyme, and the
ethics of Port Royale, so that it is impossible to decide
whether he poured his subject into a mould which his age
imposed upon him or whether he really elected this tech-
nique because his subject required it. To understand what
Phedre could not be, it is necessary to appeal to all anthro-
pology. To understand what it is, it is necessary only to
read or listen, that is, to make oneself a pure freedom and
to give one's confidence generously to a generosity. The
examples we have chosen have served only to situate the
freedom of the writer in different ages, to illuminate by
the limits of the demands made upon him the limits of
his appeal, to show by the idea of his role which the pub-
lic fashions for itself the necessary boundaries of the idea
which he invents of literature. And if it is true that the
essence of the literary work is freedom totally disclosing
and willing itself as an appeal to the freedom of other
men, it is also true that the different forms of oppression,
by hiding from men the fact that they were free, have
screened all or part of this essence from authors. Thus,
the opinions which they have formed about their profes-

151

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

sentation is already the beginning of change, as the work
of art, taken in the totality of its exigencies, is not a sim-
ple description of the present but a judgment of this pres-
ent in the name of a future, finally, as every book con-
tains an appeal, this awareness of self is a surpassing of
self. The universe is not contested in the name of simple
consumption, but in the name of the hopes and sufferings
of those who inhabit it. Thus, concrete literature will be a
synthesis of Negativity, as a power of uprooting from the
given, and a Project, as an outline of a future order; it
will be the Festival, the flaming mirror which burns
everything reflected in it, and generosity, that is, a
free invention, a gift. But if it is to be able to ally
these two complementary aspects of freedom, it is not
enough to accord the writer freedom to say everything; he
must write for a public which has the freedom of chang-
ing everything; which means, besides suppression of
classes, abolition of all dictatorship, constant renewal of
frameworks, and the continuous overthrowing of order
once it tends to congeal In short, literature is, in essence,
the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution. In
such a society it would go beyond the antinomy of word
and action. Certainly in no case would it be regarded
as an act; it is false to say that the author acts upon his
readers; he merely makes an appeal to their freedom,
and in order for his works to have any effect, it is neces-
sary for the public to adopt them on their own account
by an unconditioned decision. But in a collectivity which
constantly corrects, judges, and metamorphoses itself, the
written work can be an essential condition of action, that
is, the moment of reflective consciousness.

159

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

of the world insofar as the world is His work; it is an
inessential creation on the margin of a major Creation;
it is praise, psalm, offering, a pure reflection. By the same
token literature falls into alienation; that is, since it is, in
any case, the reflectiveness of the social body, since it re-
mains in the state of non-reflective reflectiveness, it media-
tizes the Catholic universe ; but for the clerk it remains the
immediate ; it retrieves the world, but by losing itself. But
as the reflective idea must necessarily reflect itself on pain
of annihilating itself with the whole reflected universe,
the three examples which we have studied showed a
movement of the retrieving of literature by itself, that
is, its transition from the state of unreflective and im-
mediate reflection to that of reflective mediation. At first
concrete and alienated, it liberates itself by negativity and
passes to abstraction; more exactly, it passes in the eigh-
teenth century to abstract negativity before becoming in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century absolute
negation. At the end of this evolution it has cut all its
bonds with society; it no longer even has a public. "Every
one knows," writes Paulhan, "that there are two liter-
atures in our time, the bad, which is really unreadable
(it is widely read) and the good, which is not read."

But even that is an advance; at the end of this lofty
isolation, at the end of this scornful rejection of all effi-
cacity there is the destruction of literature by itself; at
first, the terrible "it's only literature;" then, that literary
phenomenon which the same Paulhan calls terrorism,
which is born at about the same time as the idea of
parasitic gratuity, and as its antithesis, and which runs all
through the nineteenth century, contracting as it goes a

153

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

thousand irrational marriages and which finally bursts
forth shortly before the first war. Terrorism, or rather
the terrorist complex, for it is a tangle of vipers. One might
distinguish, first, so deep a disgust with the sign as such
that it leads in all cases to preferring the thing signified
to the word, the act to the statement, the word con-
ceived as object to the word-signification, that is, in the
last analysis, poetry to prose, spontaneous disorder to com-
position; second, an effort to make literature one ex-
pression among others of life, instead of sacrificing life to
literature; and third, a crisis of the writer's moral con-
science, that is the sad collapse of parasitism. Thus, with-
out for a moment conceiving the idea of losing its formal
autonomy, literature makes itself a negation of formalism
and comes to raise the question of its essential content.
To-day we are beyond terrorism and we can make use
of its experience and the preceding analyses to set down
the essential traits of a concrete and liberated literature.
We have said that, as a rule, the writer addressed all
men. But immediately afterward we noted that he was
read only by a few. As a result of the divergence between
the real public and the ideal public, there arose the idea
of abstract universality. That is, the author postulates the
constant repetition in an indefinite future of the handful
of readers which he has at present. Literary glory pecu-
liarly resembles Nietzsche's eternal recurrence; it is a
struggle against history; here, as there, recourse to the
infinity of time seeks to compensate for the failure in
space (for the author of the seventeenth century, a recur-
rence ad infinitum of the gentleman; for the one of the
nineteenth century, an extension ad infinitum of the club

154

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

of writers and the public of specialists). But as it is self-
evident that the effect of the projection into the future
of the real and present public is to perpetuate, at least
in the representation of the writer, the exclusion of the
majority of men, as, in addition, this imagining of an in-
finity of unborn readers is tantamount to extending the
actual public by a public made up of merely possible
men, the universality which glory aims at is partial and
abstract. And as the choice of the public conditions, to
a certain extent, the choice of subject, the literature
which has set up glory as its goal and its governing idea
must also remain abstract.

The term "concrete universality" must be understood,
on the contrary, as the sum total of men living in a given
society. If the writer's public could ever be extended to
the point of embracing this totality, the result would not
be that he would necessarily have to limit the reverbera-
tions of his work to the present time, but rather he would
oppose to the abstract eternity of glory, which is an im-
possible and hollow dream of the absolute, a concrete and
finite duration which he would determine by the very
choice of his subjects, and which, far from uprooting him
from history, would define his situation in social time.
As a matter of fact, every human project outlines a cer-
tain future by its very motto: if I'm going to sow, I'm
putting a whole year of waiting before me ; if I get mar-
ried, my venture suddenly causes my whole life to rise up
before me; if I launch out into politics, Fm mortgaging
a future which will extend beyond my death. The same
with writing. Already, under the pretense of belaureled
immortality, one discerns more modest and more con-

155

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

crete pretensions. The aim of The Silence of the Sea was
to lead the French to reject the enemy's efforts to get them
to collaborate. Its effectiveness and consequently its ac-
tual public could not extend beyond the time of the occu-
pation. The books of Richard Wright will remain alive as
long as the negro question is raised in the United States.
Thus, there is no question as to the writer's renouncing
the idea of survival ; quite the contrary, he is the one who
decides it; he will survive so long as he acts. Afterward,
it's honorary membership, retirement. Today, for having
wanted to escape from history, he begins his honorary
membership the day after his death, sometimes even while
he is alive.

Thus, the concrete public would be a tremendous
feminine questioning, the waiting of a whole society which
the writer would have to seduce and satisfy. But for that
the public would have to be free to ask and the writer
to answer. That means that in no case must the questions
of one group or class cover up those of other milieus;
otherwise, we would relapse into the abstract. In short,
actual literature can only realize its full essence in a class-
less society. Only in this society could the writer be aware
that there is no difference of any kind between his subject
and his public. For the subject of literature has always
been man in the world. However, as long as the virtual
public remained like a dark sea around the sunny little
beach of the real public, the writer risked confusing the in-
terests and cares of man with those of a small and favored
group. But, if the public were identified with the concrete
universal, the writer would really have to write about the
human totality. Not about the abstract man of all the

156

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

ages and for a timeless reader, but about the whole man of
his age and for his contemporaries. As a result, the literary
antinomy of lyrical subjectivity and objective testimony
would be left behind. Involved in the same adventure as
his readers and situated like them in a society without
cleavages, the writer, in speaking about them, would be
speaking about himself, and in speaking about himself
would be speaking about them. As no aristocratic pride
would any longer force him to deny that he is in a situa-
tion, he would no longer seek to soar above his times
and bear witness to it before eternity, but, as his situation
would be universal, he would express the hopes and anger
of all men, and would thereby express himself completely,
that is, not as a metaphysical creature like the medieval
clerk, nor as a psychological animal like our classical
writers, nor even as a social entity, but as a totality emerg-
ing into the world from the void and containing within
it all those structures in the indissoluble unity of the hu-
man condition; literature would really be anthropological,
in the full sense of the term.

It is quite evident that in such a society there would be
nothing which would even remotely recall the separation
of the temporal and the spiritual. Indeed, we have seen
that this division necessarily corresponds to an alienation
of man and, therefore, of literature; our analyses have
shown us that it always tends to oppose a public of
professionals or, at least, of enlightened amateurs, to the
undifferentiated masses. Whether he identifies himself
with the Good and with divine Perfection, with the Beau-
tiful or the True, a clerk is always on the side of the op-
pressors. A watchdog or a jester : it is up to him to choose.

157

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

M. Benda has chosen the cap and bells and M. Marcel
the kennel; they have the right to do so, but if literature
is one day to be able to enjoy its essence, the writer, with-
out class, without colleges, without salons, without ex-
cess of honors, and without indignity, will be thrown into
the world, among men, and the very notion of clerkship
will appear inconceivable. The spiritual, moreover, always
rests upon an ideology, and ideologies are freedom when
they make themselves and oppression when they are
made. The writer who has attained full self -consciousness
will therefore not make himself the guardian of any spir-
itual hero; he will no longer know the centrifugal move-
ment whereby certain of his predecessors turned their
eyes away from the world to contemplate the heaven of
established values ; he will know that his job is not adora-
tion of the spiritual, but rather spiritualization.

Spiritualization, that is, renewal. And there is nothing
else to spiritualize, nothing else to renew but this multi-
colored and concrete world with its weight, its opaqueness,
its zones of generalisation, and its swarm of anecdotes,
and that invincible Evil which gnaws at it without ever
being able to destroy it. The writer will renew it as is,
the raw, sweaty, smelly, everyday world, in order to sub-
mit it to freedoms on the foundation of a freedom. Liter-
ature in this classless society would thus be the world
aware of itself, suspended in a free act, and offering it-
self to the free judgment of all men, the reflective self-
awareness of a classless society. It is by means of the book
that the members of this society would be able to get their
bearings, to see themselves and see their situation. But as
the portrait compromises the model, as the simple pre-
158

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

sentation is already the beginning of change, as the work
of art, taken in the totality of its exigencies, is not a sim-
ple description of the present but a judgment of this pres-
ent in the name of a future, finally, as every book con-
tains an appeal, this awareness of self is a surpassing of
self. The universe is not contested in the name of simple
consumption, but in the name of the hopes and sufferings
of those who inhabit it. Thus, concrete literature will be a
synthesis of Negativity, as a power of uprooting from the
given, and a Project, as an outline of a future order; it
will be the Festival, the flaming mirror which burns
everything reflected in it, and generosity, that is, a
free invention, a gift. But if it is to be able to ally
these two complementary aspects of freedom, it is not
enough to accord the writer freedom to say everything; he
must write for a public which has the freedom of chang-
ing everything; which means, besides suppression of
classes, abolition of all dictatorship, constant renewal of
frameworks, and the continuous overthrowing of order
once it tends to congeal. In short, literature is, in essence,
the subjectivity of a society in permanent revolution. In
such a society it would go beyond the antinomy of word
and action. Certainly in no case would it be regarded
as an act; it is false to say that the author acts upon his
readers; he merely makes an appeal to their freedom,
and in order for his works to have any effect, it is neces-
sary for the public to adopt them on their own account
by an unconditioned decision. But in a collectivity which
constantly corrects, judges, and metamorphoses itself, the
written work can be an essential condition of action, that
is, the moment of reflective consciousness.

159

FOR WHOM DOES ONE WRITE?

Thus, in a society without classes, without dictatorship,
and without stability, literature would end by becoming
conscious of itself; it would understand that form and
content, public and subject, are identical, that the formal
freedom of saying and the material freedom of doing
complete each other, and that one should be used to de-
mand the other, that it best manifests the subjectivity of
the person when it translates most deeply collective needs
and, reciprocally, that its function is to express the con-
crete universal to the concrete universal and that its
end is to appeal to the freedom of men so that they may
realize and maintain the reign of human freedom. To be
sure, this is Utopian. It is possible to conceive this society,
but we have no practical means at our disposal of realizing
it. It has allowed us to perceive the conditions under which
literature might manifest itself in its fullness and purity.
Doubtless, these conditions are not fulfilled today; and it
is today that we must write. But if the dialectic of lit-
erature has been pushed to the point where we have been
able to perceive the essence of prose and of writing,
perhaps we may at this time attempt to answer the only
question which is urgent for us: what is the situation of
the writer in 1947; what is his public; what are his myths;
what does he wanf to write about; what can he and what
ought he write about?

160

IV

SITUATION OF THE WRITER
IN 1947

I am speaking about the French writer, the only one
who has remained a bourgeois, the only one who has
to adjust himself to a language which a hundred and
fifty years of bourgeois domination have broken, vulgar-
ized, slackened, and stuffed with "bourgeoisisms," each of
which seems a little sigh of ease and abandon. The Amer-
ican writer has often practiced manual occupations be-
fore writing his books; he goes back to them. Between
two novels, his vocation seems to be on the ranch, in
the shop, in the city streets; he does not see in literature
a means of proclaiming his solitude, but an opportunity
of escaping it. He writes blindly, out of an absurd need to
rid himself of his fears and anger, somewhat as the Mid-
west farmer writes to the New York radio commentators
to pour out his heart to them. He muses less about glory
than he dreams of fraternity. He does not invent his
manner against tradition, but for want of one, and in
certain ways his most extreme audacities are naivetes.
The world is new in his eyes, everything is yet to be said,
no one before him has spoken of the skies or the crops.

161

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

He rarely appears in New York, and if he goes there, it
is only on the run, or, like Steinbeck, he locks himself up
for three months and he's quits for the year, a year which
he will pass on the highways, in the work-yards, or in the
bars. It is true that he belongs to "guilds" and Associa-
tions, but that is purely to defend his material interests.
He has no solidarity with other writers; he is often sep-
arated from them by the length or breadth of the conti-
nent 1 ; nothing is more remote from him than the idea
of college or clerkship; for a while he is feted and then
is lost and forgotten; he reappears with a new book to
take a new plunge/

Thus, at the mercy of twenty ephemeral glories and
twenty disappearances, he drifts continually between the
working-class world, where he goes to seek adventures,
and his middle-class readers (I don't dare call them
bourgeois; I very much doubt whether there is bour-
geoisie in the United States), hard, brutal, young, and
lost, who tomorrow will take the same plunge as he.

In England, the intellectuals are less integrated into the
collectivity than we; they form an eccentric and slightly
cantankerous caste which does not have much contact
with the rest of the population. The reason is, first of all,

1, American literature is still in the stage of regionalism.

2. When I was passing through New York in 1945, I asked a literary agent
to get the rights of translation of Miss Lonelyhearts, a. work by Nathanael
West. He did not know the book and came to a gentleman's agreement with
the author of a certain Lonelyheart, an old maiden lady who was very sur-
prised that someone was thinking of translating her into French. He learned
his mistake and, continuing his search, he finally found West's publisher who
admitted that he did not know what had become of the author. I urged them
to investigate and finally they learned that West had died several years earlier
in an automobile accident. It seems that he still had a bank-account in New
York and the publisher was still sending him checks from time to time.

162

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

that they have not had our luck; because remote prede-
cessors whom we hardly deserve prepared the Revolution,
the class in power, after a century and a half, still does us
the honor of fearing us a little (very little) ; it treats us
tactfully. Our confreres in London who do not have these
glorious memories do not frighten anyone; they are con-
sidered quite harmless ; and then, club life is less suitable
for spreading their influence than salon life has been in
spreading ours. Among themselves, the men speak about
business, politics, women, or horses, never about literature,
whereas our matrons, who practised literature as an ac-
complishment, helped, by their receptions, to bring to-
gether politicians, financiers, generals, and men of letters.
The English writers make a virtue of necessity and by
aggrandizing the oddness of their ways attempt to claim
as a free choice the isolation which has been imposed upon
them by the structure of their society* Even in Italy, where
the bourgeoisie, without ever having counted for much,
has been ruined by fascism and defeat, the condition of
the writer, needy, badly paid, lodged in dilapidated pal-
aces too vast and grandiose to be heated or even furnished,
at grips with a princely language too pompous to be
supple, is far removed from ours.

Thus, we are the most bourgeois writers in the world.
Well housed, decently dressed, not so well fed, perhaps;
but even that is significant: the bourgeois spends less on
his food, proportionally, than the workman; much more
for his clothes and lodging. All of us, moreover, are
steeped in bourgeois culture; in France, where the bac-
calaureat is a hall-mark of the bourgeoisie, it is not per-
missible to plan to write without being at least a bachelor.

163

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

In other countries, the dreamy-eyed possessed twist and
squirm under the sway of an idea which has seized them
from behind and which they never manage to look in the
face. After having tried everything, they end by trying
to pour their obsession on paper and to let it dry there
with the ink. But as for us, we were used to literature long
before beginning our first novel. To us it seemed natural
for books to grow in a civilized society, like trees in a
garden. It is because we loved Racine and Verlaine too
much that when we were fourteen years old, we discov-
ered, during the evening study period or in the great court
of the lycee, our vocation as a writer. Even before having
found ourselves at grips with a work of our own that
monster, so drab, so smeared with our own sticky juices,
such a gamble we had been brought up on literature
already made, and we naively thought that our future
writings would issue from our mind in the finished state
in which we found those of others, with the seal of col-
lective recognition and the pomp which comes from secu-
lar consecration, in short, like national resources. For us,
the ultimate transformation of a poem, its last toilette
for eternity, was, after having appeared in magnificent
illustrated editions, to end by appearing in small type in
a hard-covered book bound in green canvas, whose clean
smell of ink and pulp seemed to us the very perfume of
the Muses, and to move the dreamy sons with ink-stained
fingers of the future bourgeoisie. Breton himself, who
wanted to set fire to culture, got his first literary shock
in class one day when his teacher was reading Mallarme
to him. In short, for a long time we thought that the final
destination of our work was to furnish literary texts for the

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French explication classes of 1980. Later on, five years
would be just about long enough after our first book for
us to be shaking hands with all our confreres. Centraliza-
tion has grouped us all in Paris. With a bit of luck, a busy
American might join us all in twenty-four hours, to know,
in twenty-four hours, our opinions about UNRRA, the
UNO, UNESCO, the Henry Miller affair, and the atomic
bomb; in twenty-four hours, a trained cyclist might cir-
culate from Aragon to Mauriac, from Vercors to Coc-
teau, stopping off to see Breton in Montmartre, Queneau
in Neuilly, and Billy at Fontainebleau a report of the
scruples and points of conscience which are part of our
professional obligations, one of those manifestoes, one of
those petitions or protests to Tito for or against the return
of Trieste, the annexation of the Saar, or the use of V3's
in future warfare, by which we like to show that we belong
to our century; in twenty-four hours, without a cyclist, a
piece of gossip goes all about our college and returns em-
broidered upon to the one who launched it. We all or
almost all can be seen together in certain cafes, at the
Pleiade concerts, and, in certain strictly literary circum-
stances, at the English Embassy, From time to time, one
of us who has been overworking has it announced that
he's leaving for the country; we all go to see him; we ad-
vise him that it's all for the best, that one can't write in
Paris, and we see him off with our envy and our best
wishes; as for us, an aged mother, a young mistress, or
an urgent job keeps us in town. He leaves with the re-
porters of Samedi-Soir who are going along to photograph
his retreat. He gets bored; he comes back. "After all/' he
says, "there's only Paris." It is Paris to which writers from

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the provinces, if they are well-off, come to practise region-
alism; it is Paris where the qualified representatives of
North African literature have chosen to express their
nostalgia for Algiers. Our path is cut out for us; for the
haunted Chicago Irishman who suddenly decides to write
as a last recourse, the new life which he is tackling is a
fearful thing with no point of comparison. It is a block
of dark marble which will take him a long time to hew
into shape ; but we knew, from the time we were adoles-
cent, the memorable and edifying features of great lives;
even if our father did not disapprove of our vocation,
we knew from the time we were fourteen, in the fourth
grade of the lycee, how one replies to recalcitrant parents,
how much time the author of genius has to remain un-
known, at what age it is normal for glory to crown him,
how many women he should have and how many un-
happy loves, whether it is desirable that he mix in politics,
and when; everything is written down in books; it is
enough to bear it well in mind. Romain Holland had
proved at the beginning of the century in Jean Christophe
that one can achieve a rather good likeness by combining
the features of a few famous musicians. But one can de-
vise other schemes m r it's not bad to start one's life like
Rimbaud, to begin a Goethean return to order in one's
thirties, to throw oneself at fifty, like Zola, into a public
debate. After that, you can choose the death of Nerval,
Byron, or Shelley. Naturally, it will not be a matter
of realizing each episode in all its violence, but rather of
Indicating it, the way a serious tailor indicates the fashion
without servility. I know several among us, and not the
least, who have thus taken the precaution of giving their

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lives a turn and an allure both typical and exemplary, so
that if their genius remains doubtful in their books, it
might at least shine forth in their behavior. Thanks to
these models and recipes, from our childhood on the
career of a writer seemed to us magnificent, though with-
out surprises; one is promoted partly by merit, partly by
seniority. That's what we are. In other respects, saints,
heroes, mystics, adventurers, angels, enchanters, execu-
tioners, victims, as you like. But, first of all, bourgeois.
There's no shame in admitting it. And different from one
another only in the way we each assume this common
situation.

In fact, if one wanted to make a sketch of contemporary
literature, it wouldn't be a bad idea to distinguish three
generations. The first is that of the authors who began
to produce before the war of 1914. By now they have fin-
ished their career, and their future books, even though
they may be masterpieces, will hardly be able to add to
their fame; but they are still alive, they think and judge,
and their presence determines minor literary currents
which must be taken into account. The main thing, it
seems to me, is that in their persons and by their works,
they opened the way to a reconciliation between literature
and the bourgeois public. It should first be noted that
they drew the greater part of their resources from some-
thing quite other than their writings. Gide and Mauriac
have property, Proust had independent means, Maurois
comes from a family of manufacturers; others came to
literature from the liberal professions: Duhamel was a
doctor, Romains, a teacher, Claudel and Giraudoux were
in the diplomatic service. The reason was that, except for

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

successful tripe, one could not support himself by liter-
ature in the period when they began writing. Like politics
under the Third Republic it could only be a "marginal 55
occupation, even if it ended by becoming the principal
concern of the one who practised it. Thus, literary per-
sonnel were drawn by and large from the same milieu
as political personnel; Jaures and Peguy came from the
same school; Blum and Proust wrote in the same reviews.
Barr&s carried on his literary campaigns and his electoral
campaigns on the same front. As a result, the writer could
no longer consider himself as a pure consumer; he directed
the production or supervised the distribution of goods or
he was a civil-servant; he had duties toward the State;
in short, a whole part of him was integrated into the bour-
geoisie; his behavior, his professional relationships, his
obligations, and his concerns were bourgeois; he bought,
sold, ordered, and obeyed; he entered the charmed circle
of courtesy and ceremony. Certain writers of this period
have a well-founded reputation for greed which is belied
by the appeals which they have launched in their writ-
ings. I don't know whether this reputation is justified. It
proves, all the same, that they know the value of money;
the divorce we pointed out between the author and his
public is now in the author's very soul. Twenty years
after symbolism he had not forgotten about the absolute
gratuity of art, but at the same time he was involved in
the utilitarian cycle of means-ends and ends-means. A
producer and destroyer at the same time. Divided between
the spirit of seriousness that he has to observe at Cuver-
ville, Frontenac, Elbeuf, and, when he has to represent
France, at the White House, and the holiday spirit of con-

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testation that he finds as soon as he sits down before a
blank sheet of paper; incapable of embracing bourgeois
ideology without reserve as well as of condemning with-
out recourse the class to which he belongs. What saves
him in this embarrassment is that the bourgeoisie itself
has changed ; it is no longer that fierce rising class whose
sole concern was thrift and the possession of goods. The
sons and grandsons of successful peasants and shopkeep-
ers are born into money; they have learned the art of
spending. The utilitarian ideology, without at all disap-
pearing, is relegated to the background. A hundred years
of uninterrupted reign have created traditions; bourgeois
childhoods in the great country house or in the chateau
bought from a ruined noble have acquired a poetic depth;
the "men of property" have less recourse in their prosper-
ity to the spirit of analysis; they, in turn, ask the spirit of
synthesis to establish their right to govern; a synthetic
thus poetic bond is established between the proprietor
and the thing possessed.

Barres was the first to invent it; the bourgeois is one
with his property. If he remains in his province and on
his estate, something passes into him from the gentle
foot-hills of his region, from the silvery quivering of the
poplars, from the mysterious and slow fecundity of the
soil, from the rapid and capricious nervousness of the
skies; in assimilating the world, he assimilates its depth;
henceforth, his soul has substrata, mines, gold-lodes, veins,
underground sheets of petroleum. Henceforth the ralli^ 1

1. Translator's note Les rallies : "Royalists and imperialists who have Ac-
cepted the Republic." This term will appear hereafter in the text.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

writer has his path cut out for him; to save himself he
will save the bourgeoisie depthwise.

Of course, he will not serve utilitarian ideology. He will
even be, if necessary, its severe critic, but he will disclose
all the gratuity in the exquisite hothouse of the bourgeois
soul, all the spirituality which he needs to practise his art
with a good conscience, Instead of reserving this symbolic
aristocracy, which he won in the nineteenth century, for
himself and his confreres alone, he will extend it to the
whole bourgeoisie. About 1850, an American writer
showed, in a novel, an old colonel sitting in a Mississippi
steamboat; for a moment he was tempted to ponder the
innermost recesses of the souls of the passengers about
him. He soon dismissed this preoccupation, saying to him-
self, or approximately, "It is not good for man to pene-
trate too far into himself. 55 That was the reaction of the
first bourgeois generation.

About 1900 the machine was reversed in France: it
was understood that one would find the seal of God in
the human heart, provided he sounded it deeply enough.
Estaunie speaks about secret lives. The postal-clerk, the
blacksmith, the engineer, the departmental treasurer, all
have their nocturnal and solitary fetes. Consuming pas-
sions and wild conflagrations dwell deeply within them.
In the wake of this author, and a hundred others, we were
to learn to recognize in stamp and coin collecting all the
nostalgia for the beyond, all the Baudelairean dissatis-
faction. For I ask you, why would one spend his time and
money acquiring medallions, were it not that he was past
caring for the friendship of men and the love of women
and power? And what is more gratuitious than a stamp

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collection? Not everybody can be a Leonardo or a Michel
Angelo, but those useless stamps pasted on the pink pages
of an album are a touching homage to all the nine muses;
it is the very essence of destructive consumption.

Others saw in bourgeois love a desperate appeal mount-
ing toward God. What is more disinterested, what is more
poignant than an adultery? And that taste of ashes in
one's mouth after coitus, is it not negativity itself and the
contestation of all pleasures? Others went even further.
They discovered a divine grain of madness not in the
weaknesses of the bourgeoisie but in its very virtues. We
were shown that the oppressed and hopeless life of the
mother of a family was so absurd and so lofty in its ob-
stinacy that all the extravagances of the surrealists ap-
peared as common sense in comparison. A young author
who underwent the influence of these teachers without
belonging to their generation and who has since changed
his mind, if I may judge by his behavior, once said to me,
"Is there any madder wager than conjugal fidelity? Isn't
it braving the Devil and even God? Show me a madder
and more magnificent blasphemy. 35 You can see the trick;
it's a matter of beating the great destroyers on their own
ground. You name Don Juan and I answer by Orgon;
there's more generosity, more cynicism, and more despair
in raising a family than in seducing a thousand and one
women. You offer Rimbaud, I come back with Chrysale;
there's more pride and Satanism in assuming that the
chair that one sees is a chair than in practising the sys-
tematic deranging of the senses. And so that there will be
no doubt about it, the chair which is given to our per-
ception is only probable; to assert that it is a chair, one

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

must take a leap to the infinite and suppose an infinity of
concordant representations. Doubtless, the vow of con-
jugal love also involves a virgin future; the sophism be-
gins when one presents these necessary, and so to speak,
natural inductions that man makes against time and to
insure his tranquillity as the most audacious defiances,
the most desperate contestations.

Be that as it may, that is how the writers I am talking
about established their reputation. They addressed a new
generation and explained to it that there was a strict
equivalence between production and consumption and be-
tween construction and destruction; they demonstrated
that order was a perpetual festival and disorder the most
boring monotony. They discovered the poetry of daily life,
made virtue enticing, even disturbing, and painted the
bourgeois epic in long novels full of mysterious and per-
turbing smiles. That was all their readers asked for; when
one is honest out of self-interest, virtuous out of pusil-
lanimity, and faithful out of habit, it is agreeable to hear
it said that he surpasses a professional seducer or a high-
wayman in boldness. Around 1924, I knew a young man
of good family who was infatuated with literature, par-
ticularly contemporary authors. He acted quite mad when
it was the thing to do, gorged himself on the poetry of
the bars when it was d la mode, flashily paraded a mis-
tress, and then, when his father died, prudently took over
the family factory and followed the straight and narrow.
He has since married an heiress; he doesn't deceive her,
or, if he does, it's only on the sly, when he takes a trip.
In short, the most faithful of husbands. Just about the
time he got married, he drew from his reading the for-

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mula that was to justify his life: "One shoiJd do what
everyone else does/ 5 he wrote to me one day, "and be
like no one else." You can guess that I regard that as the
most abject garbage and the justification of all sorts of
dishonesty. But it sums up rather well, I think, the ethics
which our authors sold their public. They justified them-
selves with it first of all : youVe got to do what everyone
else does, that is, sell Elbeuf cloth or Bordeaux wine ac-
cording to the conventional rules, take a wife with a
dowry, visit your parents regularly, and your in-laws and
the friends of your in-laws : you Ve got to be like no one
else, that is, save your soul and your family's by fine
writings which are both destructive and respectful. I
shall call the ensemble of these works an alibi literature.
It rapidly supplanted that of the hireling writers. Since
before the first war the governing classes needed alibis
more than incense. The marvelous of Fournier was an
alibi; a whole line of bourgeois fairies sprang from him;
in each case it was a matter of leading each reader ap-
proximately to that obscure spot of the most bourgeois
soul where all dreams meet and melt in a desperate desire
for the impossible, where all the events of the most hu-
man everyday existence are lived as symbols, where the
real is devoured by the imaginary, where the whole man
is no longer anything but a divine absence. People are
sometimes astonished that Arland was the author of both
Foreign Lands and Order; but they shouldn't be. The so
noble dissatisfaction of his first heroes has meaning only
if one experiences it at the heart of a strict order; it is not
at all a matter of revolting against marriage, the profes-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

sions, and the social disciplines, but of delicately going
beyond them by means of a nostalgia which nothing can
satisfy because at bottom it is not a desire for anything.
Thus, order is there only to be transcended, but it must
be there. There you have it, justified and solidly re-
established. It's certainly better to contest it by a dreamy
melancholy than to overthrow it by arms. I shall say as
much about the Gidian restlessness, which later became
confusion, and the Mauriacian sin, the place from which
God is absent. It is always a matter of putting daily life
in parentheses and living it scrupulously but without soil-
ing one's hands; it is always a matter of proving that man
is worth more than his life, that love is much more than
love and the bourgeois much more than the bourgeois.
In the greater writers there is, of course, something else.
In Gide, in Claudel, in Proust, one finds the real ex-
perience of a man, a thousand directions. But I have not
wanted to draw a picture of a period but rather to show
a climate and isolate a myth. 1

The second generation comes of age after 1918. Of
course, this is a very rough classification since we are in-
cluding Cocteau, who started before the war, whereas
Marcel Arland, whose first book, to my knowledge, does
not antedate the armistice, has definite affinities with
the writers whom we have just spoken about. The obvious
absurdity of a war whose true causes it took us thirty years
to know leads back the spirit of Negativity. I am not go-

1. In Jouhandeau the bourgeois souls have the same quality of the mar-
velous; but often this marvelous changes sign; it becomes negative and
Satanic. As you might well imagine, the black masses of the bourgeoisie are
still more fascinating than its permissible displays.

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ing to enlarge upon this period "of decompression," as
Thibaudet has so well named it. It was all fireworks;
now that it has fallen, so much has been written about it
that we seem to know it thoroughly. All we need note is
that its most magnificent rocket, surrealism, ties in with
the destructive tradition of the writer-consumer. These
turbulent young bourgeois wanted to ruin culture because
they were cultivated; their chief enemy was Heine's
philistine, Monnier's Prudhomme, and Flaubert's bour-
geois, in short, their papa. But the violence of the pre-
ceding years had brought them to radicalism. Whereas
their predecessors had confined themselves to combatting
the utilitarian ideology of the bourgeoisie by consumption,
they more deeply identified the quest of the useful with the
human project, that is, with the conscious and voluntary
life. Consciousness is bourgeois, the self is bourgeois. Nega-
tivity should devote itself, in the first place, to that nature
which, as Pascal says, is only a first layer of custom. The
first thing to be done is to eliminate the conventional dis-
tinctions between conscious and unconscious life, between
dream and waking. This means that subjectivity is dis-
solved. There is, in effect, the subjective when we recog-
nize, the moment they appear, that our thoughts, our
emotions, and our will come from us, and when we be-
lieve both that it is certain that they belong to us and only
probable that the external world is guided by them.

The surrealist took a hearty dislike to that humble cer-
tainty on which the stoic based his ethics. It displeased
him both by the limits it assigns us and the responsibilities
it places upon us. Any means were good for escaping con-
sciousness of self and consequently of one's situation in

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the world. He adopted psychoanalysis because it pre-
sented consciousness as being invaded by parasitical out-
growths whose origin is elsewhere; he rejected "the bour-
geois idea" of work because work implies conjectures,
hypotheses, and projects, thus, a perpetual recourse to
the subjective. Automatic writing was, above all, destruc-
tion of subjectivity. When we try our hand at it, we are
spasmodically cut through by clots which tear us apart;
we are ignorant of their origin; we do not know them
before they have taken their place in the world of objects
and we must then perceive them with foreign eyes. Thus,
it was not a matter, as has too often been said, of substi-
tuting their unconscious subjectivity for consciousness, but
rather of showing the object as a fitful glimmering at the
heart of an objective universe. But the surrealist's second
step was to destroy objectivity in turn. It was a matter of
exploding the world, and as dynamite was not enough, as,
on the other hand, a real destruction of the totality of
existants was impossible, because it would simply cause
this totality to pass from one real state to another real
state, one had to do his best rather to disintegrate par-
ticular objects, that is, to do away with the very structure
of objectivity in these objects-evidences. Evidently this
operation cannot be~tried out on real existants which are
already given with their indeformable essence. Hence, one
will produce imaginary objects, so constructed that their
objectivity does away with itself. We are given a first
draft of this procedure in the false pieces of sugar which
Duchamp actually cut in marble and which suddenly re-
vealed themselves as having an unexpected weight. The
visitor who weighed them in his hand was supposed to

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feel, in a blazing and instantaneous illumination, the self-
destruction of the objective essence of sugar. It was neces-
sary to let him know the deception of all being, the
malaise, the off-balance feeling we get, for example,
from trick gadgets, when the spoon abruptly melts in the
tea-cup, when the sugar (an inverse hoax to the one
Duchamp constructed) rises to the surface and floats. It
was hoped that by means of this intuition the whole world
would be exposed as a radical contradiction. Surrealist
painting and sculpture had no other aim than to multi-
ply these local and imaginary explosions which were like
holes through which the entire universe would be drained
out. The paranoiacally critical method of Dali was only
a perfecting and complication of the procedure. It also
professed to be an effort "to contribute to the total dis-
credit of the world of reality." Literature also did its best
to make language go through the same kind of thing and
to destroy it by telescoping words. Thus, the sugar refers
to the marble and the marble to the sugar; the limp
watch contests itself by its limpness; the objective de-
stroys itself and suddenly refers to the subjective, since
one disqualifies reality and is pleased to "consider the
very images of the external world as unstable and transi-
tory 55 and to "put them into the service of the reality of
our mind. 55 But the subjective then breaks down in its
turn and allows a mysterious objectivity to appear be-
hind it.

All this without even starting a single real destruction.
Quite the contrary; by means of the symbolic annul-
ment of the self by sleep and automatic writing, by the
symbolic annulment of objects by producing evanescent

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

objectivities, by the symbolic annulment of language by
producing aberrant meanings, by the destruction of paint-
ing by painting and of literature by literature, surrealism
pursues this curious enterprise of realising nothingness
by too much fullness of being. It is always by creating,
that is, by adding paintings to already existing paint-
ings and books to already published books, that it de-
stroys. Whence, the ambivalence of its works: each of
them can pass for the barbaric and magnificent inven-
tion of a form, of an unknown being, of an extraordinary
phrase, and, as such, can become a voluntary contribu-
tion to culture; and as each of them is a project for an-
nihilating all the rest by annihilating itself along with it,
Nothingness glitters on its surface, a Nothingness which is
only the endless fluttering of contradictions. And the esprit
which the surrealists wish to attain on the ruins of sub-
jectivity, this esprit of which it is not possible to have an
inkling otherwise than by the accumulation of self-de-
structive objects, also sparkles and flickers in the recipro-
cal and congealed annihilation of things. It is neither
Hegelian Negativity, nor hypostasized Negation, nor even
Nothingness, though it bears a likeness to it; it would be
more correct to calLit the Impossible or, if you like, the
imaginary point where dream and waking, the real and
the fictitious, the objective and the subjective, merge.
Confusion and not synthesis, for synthesis would appear
as an articulated existence, dominating and governing its
internal contradictions. But surrealism does not desire
the appearance of this novelty which it would again
have to contest. It wants to maintain itself in the en-
ervating tension which is produced by an unrealizable

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intuition. At least Rimbaud wanted to see a drawing-
room in a lake; the surrealist wants to be perpetually
on the point of seeing lake and drawing-room; if, by
chance, he encounters them, he gets disgusted or he
gets scared and gets into bed with the blinds drawn.
He ends up by doing a lot of painting and writing but he
never actually destroys anything. Moreover, Breton rec-
ognized this in 1925 when he wrote: "The immediate
reality of the surrealist revolution is not so much to
change anything whatever in the physical and ap-
parent order of things as to criticize a movement in
the mind." The destruction of the universe is the object
of a subjective enterprise very like what has always been
called philosophical conversion. This world, perpetually
annihilated without one's touching a grain of wheat or
sand or a feather of a bird, is quite simply put in paren-
theses. It has not been sufficiently noted that the con-
structions, paintings and poems-objects of surrealism
were the manual realization of the sterilities by which
the sceptics of the third century B.C. justified their per-
petual "epoche." After which, Carneades and Philo
sure of not compromising themselves by an imprudent
adherence, lived like everybody else. In the same way,
the surrealists, once the world is destroyed and miracu-
lously preserved by its destruction, can shamelessly give
full play to their immense love of the world. This world,
the world of every day, with its trees and roofs, its
women, its sea-shells, and its flowers, but haunted by
the impossible and by nothingness, is what is called the
surrealist marvelous. I can not keep myself from think-
ing of that other parenthesis by which the rallie writers

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

of the preceding generation destroyed bourgeois life and
preserved it with all its nuances. Isn't the surrealist
marvelous that of The Wanderer (Le Grand Meaulnes),
but radicalized? Certainly its passion is sincere, as are
its hatred of and disgust with the bourgeois class. But
the situation has not changed: one must save oneself
without breaking anything, or by a symbolic break-
ing wash oneself of the original contamination without
giving up the advantages of one's position.

The root of the matter is that once again one has to
find an eagle's nest. The surrealists, more ambitious
than their fathers, count on the radical and metaphysical
destruction which they are initiating to confer upon
them a dignity a thousand times superior to that of the
parasitic aristocracy. It is no longer a matter of escap-
ing from the bourgeois class; one must leap out of the
human condition. It is the family patrimony that these
sons want to squander, it is the world. They have come
back to parasitism as to a lesser evil, abandoning every-
thing, studies and professions, by common consent; but
they have never been satisfied with being parasites on
the bourgeoisie; their ambition has been to be parasites
on the human race. Metaphysical as it may be, it is
clear that they have been unclassed from above and that
their preoccupations have strictly forbidden them from
finding a public in the working class. Breton once wrote:
"Marx said, Transform the world. 5 Rimbaud said,
'Change life. 9 For us, these two orders are one and the
same." That would be enough to reveal the bourgeois
intellectual For it is a question of knowing which change
precedes which. For the militant Marxist there is no

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doubt that social transformation alone can permit radical
transformations of thought and feeling. If Breton thinks
that he can pursue his inner experiences on the margin
of revolutionary activity and parallel to it, he is con-
demned in advance, for that would amount to saying
that a freedom of spirit is conceivable in chains, at least
for certain people, and, consequently, to making revolu-
tion less urgent. This is the very betrayal of which rev-
olutionaries have always accused Epictetus and of which
Politzer not long ago accused Bergson. And if it is main-
tained that Breton intended in this text to announce a
progressive and interlinked metamorphosis of the social
state and the intimate life, I answer by citing this other
passage: "Everything leads us to believe that there is a
certain point in the mind from which life and death,
the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the
communicable and the incommunicable, the high and
the low, cease to be regarded as contradictory. . . One
would be wasting his time looking for any other motive
in surrealist activity than the hope of determining this
point." Is this not a proclamation of divorce from a work-
ing-class public more than from a bourgeois public? For
the proletariat, engaged in struggle, must at every mo-
ment, in order to bring its undertaking to a successful
conclusion, distinguish the past from the future, the
real from the imaginary, and life from death. It is not
by accident that Breton has cited these contraries; they
are all categories of action; revolutionary activity, more
than any other, needs them. And just as surrealism has
radicalized the negation of the useful in order to trans-
form it into a rejection of the project and the conscious

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

life, it radicalizes the old literary claim of gratuity in
order to make of it a rejection of action by destroying
its categories. There is a surrealist quietism. Quietism
and permanent violence; two complementary aspects of
the same position. As the surrealist has deprived himself
of the means of planning an enterprise, his activity is
reduced to impulsions in the immediate. We find here
a heavier and duller version of the Gidean moment.
That's not surprising; there is quietism in all parasitism
and the favorite tempo of consumption is the moment.
Yet, surrealism declares itself revolutionary and offers
its hand to the Communist Party. It is the first time since
the Restoration that a literary school explicitly claims
kinship with an organized revolutionary movement. The
reasons are clear: these writers, who are also young peo-
ple, want, above all, to destroy their family, their uncle
the general, their cousin the cure, as Baudelaire in 1848
saw in the February revolution an opportunity to set fire
to the house of General Aupick; if they were born poor,
they have also certain complexes to liquidate, envy and
fear; and then they are also rebelling against external
constraints: the recently ended war, with its censor-
ship, military service, taxes, army-ridden legislature, and
all the general eye-wash; they are all anti-clerical, neither
more nor less than Combes and the pre-war radicals, and
they are nobly disgusted with colonialism and the war in
Morocco. These indignations and hatreds are capable
of being expressed abstractly by a conception of radical
Negation which, a fortiori, will bring about, without
there being any need of making it the object of a par-
ticular act of will, the negation of the bourgeois class.

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And youth being the metaphysical age par excellence,
as Auguste Comte well noted, this metaphysical and
abstract expression of their revolt is evidently the one
they are choosing in preference. However, it is also the
one which leaves the world strictly intact. It is true
that they also add a few sporadic acts of violence, but
at most, these scattered acts of violence succeed in pro-
voking scandal. The best they can hope for is to set
themselves up as a primitive and secret society on the
model of the Ku Klux Klan. Thus, they get so far as
to want others to take upon themselves, on the margin
of their spiritual experiences, the forceful execution of
acts of concrete destruction. In short, they would like to
be the clerks of an ideal society whose temporal func-
tion would be the permanent practice of violence. 1 In
this way, after having praised the suicides of Vache and
Rigaut as exemplary acts, after having presented gra-
tuitous massacre ("firing into the crowd") as the sim-
plest surrealistic act, they summon to their aid the yel-
low peril. They do not see the profound contradiction
which opposes these brutal and partial destructions to the
poetic process of annihilation which they have under-
taken. Indeed, every time a destruction is partial, it is
a means for attaining a positive and more general end.
Surrealism stops at this means; it makes it an absolute
end; it refuses to go further. On the contrary, the total
abolition it dreams of does not harm anybody precisely

1. To make oneself the clerk of violence implies that one deliberately adopts
violence as a method of thought, that is, one has common recourse to intimi-
dation, to the principle of authority; one haughtily refuses to demonstrate
and discuss. This is what gives the dogmatic texts of the surrealists a purely
formal but disturbing resemblance to the political writings of Charles Maurras.

183

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

because it is total. It is an absolute located outside of
history, a poetic fiction. And it brings into the picture,
among the realities to abolish, the end which, in the eyes
of Asiatics or revolutionaries, justifies the violent means
to which they are forced to have recourse.

As for the Communist Party, hounded by the bourgeois
police, very inferior in number to the Socialist Party, with
no hope of taking power except in the distant future, new,
uncertain in its tactics, it is still in the negative phase.
Its job is to win over the masses, bore from within among
the socialists, and incorporate the elements that it will
be able to detach from the collectivity which repulses
it; its intellectual arm is criticism. Thus, it is not dis-
inclined to see in surrealism a temporary ally which it is
getting ready to reject when it will no longer need it;
for negation, the essence of surrealism, is only a stage for
the C.P. The latter is not willing even for a moment to
consider automatic writing, induced sleep, and objective
chance, except in so far as they may contribute to the
disintegration of the bourgeois class. Thus, it seems that
we have re-encountered that community of interests be-
tween the intellectuals and the oppressed classes which
was the good fortune of the authors of the eighteenth
century. But this is only an appearance. The deep source
of the misunderstanding lies in the fact that the sur-
realist is very little concerned with the dictatorship of the
proletariat and sees in the Revolution, as pure violence,
the absolute end, whereas the end that communism pro-
poses to itself is the taking of power, and by means of
that end it justifies the blood it will shed. And then the
bond between surrealism and the proletariat is indirect

184

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

and abstract. The strength of a writer lies in his direct
action upon the public, in the anger, the enthusiasm, and
the reflections which he stirs up by his writings. Diderot,
Rousseau, and Voltaire were in constant contact with
the bourgeoisie because it read them. But the surrealists
have no readers in the proletariat; there is just a bare
chance of their communicating with the party from the
outside, or rather with its intellectuals. Their public is
elsewhere, among the cultivated bourgeoisie; the C.P.
knows this and uses them simply to stir up trouble in
ruling-class circles. Thus, their revolutionary doctrines
remain purely theoretical (since they change nothing
by their attitude), do not help them gain a single reader,
and find no echo among the workers; they remain the
parasites of the class they insult; their revolt remains
on the margin of the revolution. Breton finally recognizes
this himself and returns to his independence as a clerk.
He writes to Naville: "There is not one of us who does
not wish for the passing of power from the hands of the
bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat. In the meantime,
it is none the less necessary that the experiences of the
inner life continue and, of course, with no external con-
trol, even Marxist. . . The two problems are essentially
distinct. 55

The opposition will be accentuated when Soviet Rus-
sia and consequently the French Communist Party pass
to the phase of constructive organization; surrealism,
having remained negative in essence, will turn away from
them. Breton will then draw near the Trotskyists pre-
cisely because the latter, a hounded minority, are still
at the stage of critical negation. The Trotskyists, in their

185

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

turn, will use the surrealists as an instrument of dis-
integration; a letter from Trotsky to Breton leaves no
doubt about the matter. If the Fourth International too
had been able to pass to the constructive phase, it is
clear that it would have been the occasion of a break.

Thus, the bourgeois writer's first attempt to recon-
cile himself with the proletariat remains Utopian and
abstract because he is not seeking a public but an ally,
because he preserves and reinforces the division of the
temporal and spiritual and because he maintains himself
within the limits of a clerkship. The agreement on prin-
ciple between surrealism and the C.P. against the bour-
geoisie does not go beyond formalism; it is the formal
idea of negativity which unites them. In fact, the nega-
tivity of the Communist Party is temporary; it is a nec-
essary, historical moment in its great enterprise of social
reorganization; surrealist negativity, whatever one may
say about it, remains outside of history, in the moment
and in the eternal simultaneously; it is the absolute end
of life and art. Breton somewhere asserts the identity,
or at least parallelism with reciprocal symbolization, of
mind in its struggle against its bug-bears and the prole-
tariat in its struggle against capitalism, which amounts
to asserting the "sacred mission" of the proletariat. But
the fact is that this class conceived as a legion of destroy-
ing angels, and which the C.P. defends against the ap-
proaches of the surrealists like a wall, is really only a
quasi-religious myth for the authors, one which plays,
for the tranquillization of their conscience, a role anal-
ogous to that of the myth of the people in 1848 for
the writers of good will.

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

The originality of the surrealist movement resides
in its attempt to appropriate everything at the same
time: unclassing from above, parasitism, aristocracy,
the metaphysic of consumption, and alliance with rev-
olutionary forces. The history of this attempt has shown
that it was doomed to failure. But fifty years earlier it
would not even have been conceivable; the only relation
a bourgeois writer could have had at that time with the
working class was to write for it and about it. The thing
that permits dreaming, be it only for a moment,, of con-
cluding a temporary pact between an intellectual aris-
tocracy and the oppressed classes is the appearance of a
new factor : the party as a mediation between the middle
classes and the proletariat.

I understand well enough that surrealism with its
ambiguous aspect of literary chapel, spiritual college,
church, and secret society 1 is only one of the post-war
products. One would have to speak of Morand, Drieu
la Rochelle, and a host of others. But if the works of
Breton, Peret, and Desnos have seemed to us the most
representative, the fact is that all the others implicitly
contain the same traits. Morand is the consuming type,
the traveler, the wayfarer. He nullifies national tradi-
tions by putting them into contact with each other ac-
cording to the old procedure of the sceptics and Mon-
taigne; he throws them into a basket like crabs, and,
without commentary, leaves it to them to tear each other
apart. It is a matter of achieving a certain gamma point,

1. A resemblance to Action Frangaise of which Maurras was Able to say
that it was not a party but a conspiracy. And don't the punitive expeditions
of the surrealists resemble the pranks of the young royalist henchmen?

187

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

highly akin to the gamma point of the surrealists, whence
differences of custom, language, and interests abolish
each other in the total indistinctness. Here speed plays
the role of the paranoiac-critical method. Gallant Europe
is the nullification of countries by the railroad; Nothing
but the Earth, the nullification of continents by the air-
plane. Morand has Asiatics go about in London, Amer-
icans in Syria, and Turks in Norway; he shows our cus-
toms as seen through these eyes, as Montesquieu did by
those of Persians, which is the surest way of removing their
raison d'etre. But at the same time he arranges it so that
these visitors have lost much of their pristine purity and
are already thorough 'traitors to their customs without
having completely adopted ours; at this particular mo-
ment of their transformation each of them is a battlefield
where the exotic and picturesque and our rationalistic
mechanism are being destroyed by each other. His
books, full of tinsel and trinkets and strange, lovely
names, nevertheless, ring the knell of exoticism; they are
at the origin of a whole literature which aims at doing
away with local color, either by showing that the distant
cities we dreamed of in our childhood are as hopelessly
familiar and commonplace to the eyes of their inhabit-
ants as the Saint Lazare Station and the Eiffel Tower
are to ours, or by letting us perceive the comedy, hokum,
and absence of faith behind ceremonies which travelers
of past centuries described for us with the utmost respect,
or by revealing to us through the worn-out screen of
oriental or African picturesqueness the universality of
capitalist mechanism and rationalism. In the end noth-
ing else is left but the world, similar and monotonous

188

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

everywhere. I have never felt the deeper meaning of
this procedure so keenly as I did one day in the summer
of 1938, between Mogador and Sufi, when I was in a
bus which passed a veiled Mohammedan woman who
was riding a bicycle. A Mohammedan woman on a bike !
There you have a self-destructive object which the sur-
realists or Morand can equally well lay claim to. The
precise mechanism of the bicycle contests the idle harem
dreams which one ascribes to this veiled creature as she
passes by but at the same moment what remains of the
voluptuous and magical darkness between the painted
eyebrows and behind the low forehead contests, in turn,
mechanism; it gives us a feeling that behind capital-
ist standardization, there is something beyond, which,
though chained and conquered, is yet virulent and be-
witching. Phantom exoticism, the surrealist impossible,
and bourgeois dissatisfaction: in all three cases the real
breaks down; behind it one tries to maintain the irritat-
ing tension of the contradictory. In the case of the
traveling writers the ruse is obvious : they suppress exot-
icism because one is always exotic in relation to someone,
and they don't want to be; they destroy history and
traditions in order to escape from their historical situa-
tion; they want to forget that the most lucid conscious-
ness is always grafted on to something; they want to ef-
fect a fictitious liberation by means of an abstract inter-
nationalism and to achieve, by means of universalism,
an aristocratic detachment.

Drieu, like Morand, sometimes makes use of self-
destruction by exoticism: in one of his novels, the Al-
hambra becomes an arid provincial park under a mo-

189

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

notonous sky. But through the literary destruction of the
object, of love, over twenty years of follies and bitter-
ness, he was pursuing the destruction of himself; he was
the empty valise, the opium smoker, and in the end, the
vertigo of death drew him into National Socialism.
Gilles, the squalid and glib novel about his life, shows
clearly that he was the enemy brother of the surrealists.
His Nazism, which also was only an appetite for uni-
versal conflagration, proved, in practice, to be as in-
effectual as the communism of Breton. Both of them
are clerks. Both of them, innocently and without ul-
terior motives ally themselves with the temporal. But
the surrealists are healthier; their myth of destruction
covers up an enormous and magnificent appetite; they
want to destroy everything but themselves, as is shown
by their horror of disease, vice, and drugs. Drieu, gloomy
and more genuine, meditated upon his death; it was
because of self -hatred that he hated his country and man-
kind. They all were after the absolute, and as they were
hemmed in everywhere by the relative, they identified
the absolute with the impossible. They all hesitated be-
tween two roles: that of proclaimers of a new world
and that of gravediggers of the old. But as it was easier
to discern signs of decadence in post-war Europe than
those of renewal, they chose to be gravediggers. And to
soothe their conscience they restored to a place of honor
the old Heraclitean myth according to which life is
born from death. They were all haunted by that im-
aginary gamma point, the only steadfast thing in a
world in movement, when destruction, because it is ut-
terly and hopelessly destruction, is identified with ab-

190

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

solute construction. They were all fascinated by violence,
wherever it might come from; it was by violence that
they wanted to free man from his human condition. That
is why they joined hands with extreme parties by gra-
tuitously ascribing to them apocalyptic aims. They were
all duped: the Revolution has not come off and Nazism
has been beaten. They lived in a comfortable and lavish
period when despair was still a luxury. They condemned
their country because they were still insolent with vic-
tory; they denounced war because they thought the
peace would be a long one. They were all victims of
the disaster of 1940: the reason is that the moment for
action had come and that none of them were armed for
it. Some killed themselves, others are in exile; those who
have returned are exiled among us. They were the pro-
claimers of catastrophe in the time of the fat cows; in
the time of the lean cows they have nothing more to
say. 1

1. These passionless remarks have stirred up impassioned whirlwinds. How-
ever, far from convincing me, the defenses and the attacks have made me more
convinced than ever that surrealism has lost perhaps temporarily its time-
liness. As a matter of fact, I find that most of its defenders are eclectics. It
is made out to be a cultural phenomenon "of high importance," an "exem-
plary" attitude, and an attempt is being made to integrate it on the q.t. into
bourgeois humanism. If it still had any life in it, would it be willing to spice
the slightly stale rationalism of M. Alqui6 with the Freudian pepper? In the
last analysis, it is a victim of the idealism which it has so fought against;
the Gazette des lettres, Fontaine, and Carre/our are stomach pockets which
just can't wait to digest it.

If a Desnos could have read in 1930 the following lines of M. Claude
Mauriac, a young spark-plug of the Fourth Republic: "Man fights against
man without realizing that the joint effort of all minds should first be brought
to bear against a certain skimpy and false conception of man. But surrealism
has known this and has been crying it aloud for twenty years. As an enter-
prise of knowledge, it proclaims that everything about the traditional modes
of thinking and feeling has to be re-invented," he would certainly have pro-
tested; surrealism was not an "enterprise of knowledge; 99 he specifically

191

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

quoted Marx's famous phrase: "We do not want to understand the world; we
want to change it;" he never wanted this "joint effort of minds" which pleas-
antly recalls the Rally of the French People [General de Gaulle's Rassem-
blement Populaire Francais]. Against this rather silly optimism he always af-
firmed the strict connection between inner censorship and oppression; if there
had to be a joint effort of all minds (that expression minds, in the plural,
is hardly surrealistic!) it would come after the Revolution. In his heyday
he would not have tolerated anyone's brooding over him that way in order to
understand him. He considered like the Communist Party in this respect
that everything that was not totally and exclusively for him was against him.
Is he aware today of the way he is being maneuvered? In order to enlighten
him, I shall therefore reveal to him that M. Bataille, before publicly inform-
ing Merleau-Ponty that he was withdrawing his article from us, had notified
him of his intentions in a private conversation. [M. Merleau-Ponty is a mem-
ber of the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes of which M. Sartre is
editor-in-chief and in which the present work was originally serialized.] This
champion of surrealism had then declared, "I have serious charges to make
against Breton, but we must unite against communism." That should be suf-
ficient! I think that I show more esteem for surrealism by harking back to
the time of its ardent life and by discussing its aim than by slyly trying to
assimilate it. It is true that it is not going to thank me for it, for, like all
totalitarian parties, it affirms the continuity of its views in order to mask their
perpetual change and therefore does not at all like anyone to hark back to its
previous declarations. Many of the texts I meet with today in the catalogue
of the surrealist exhibition (Surrealism in 1947) and which are approved by
the chiefs of the movement are closer to the gentle eclecticism of M. Claude
Mauriac than to the bitter revolts of the first surrealism. Here, for example,
are a few lines of M. Pastoureau: "The political experiment of surrealism
which has caused it to revolve around the Communist Party for some ten
years is very plainly conclusive. To attempt to continue it would be to lock
itself up in the dilemma of compromise and ineffectualness. To follow the
Communist Party in the way of the collaboration of classes to which it is com-
mitted is contradictory to the motives which in the past pushed surrealism
into undertaking political action and v/hich are as much immediate demands
in the domain of the mind and especially in that of morals as the pursuit of
the distant end which is Ihe total liberation of man. And yet, it is obvious
that the politics on which one might base the hope of seeing the aspirations
of the proletariat realized is not that of the so-called left opposition to the
Communist Party nor that of the little anarchist groups. . . Surrealism whose
appointed role is to demand innumerable reforms in the domain of the mind,
and, in particular, ethical reforms, can no more participate in a political ac-
tion which is necessarily immoral in order to be effective than it can par-
ticipate, unless by renouncing the liberation of man as a goal to be attained,
in a political action which is necessarily ineffectual because respectful of
principles which it thinks it does not have to violate. Thus, it retires into
itself. Its efforts will again tend to fulfill the same demands and to hasten
the liberation of man, but by other means."

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

(Analogous texts and even identical phrases will be found in "Inaugural
Break," a declaration adopted June 21, 1947 by the group in France. Cf.
pp. 8-11.)

The reader will note, in passing, the word "reform" and the extraordinary
recourse to morals. Will we some day read a periodical entitled "Surrealism
in the Service of Reform"? But above all, this text established surrealism's
break with Marxism: everybody now agrees that one can act on superstruc-
tures without the economic substructure's being modified. An ethical and
reformist surrealism wanting to confine its action to changing ideologies: that
smacks dangerously of idealism. What these "other means" are remains to
be determined. Is surrealism going to offer us new scales of values? Is it
going to produce a new ideology? Not a bit; surrealism is going to busy it-
self, "pursuing its old-time objectives, in weakening Christian civilization and
in preparing the conditions for the coming of the eventual Weltanschauung"
It is still, obviously, a matter of negation. Western civilization even Pas-
toureau admits it is moribund; a tremendous war threatens it and will at-
tend to burying it; our time calls for a new ideology which permits man to
live; but surrealism will continue to attack the "Christian-Thomist stage" of
civilization. And how can it be attacked? By the pretty lollipop of the 1947
Exhibition? Let's rather go back to the real surrealism, that of the Point du
Jour, of Nadja, of the communicating vessels.

Alquie and Max-Pol Fouchet stress above everything else the fact that it
was an attempt at liberation. According to them, it is a matter of asserting
the rights of the human totality without omitting anything, be it the uncon-
scious, the dream, sexuality, or the imaginary. I am in complete agreement
with them. That is what surrealism wanted; that is certainly the greatness
of its enterprise. It should again be noted that the "totalitarian" idea is
typical of the age; it animates the Nazi, the Marxist, and, today, the "ex-
istentialist" attempt. It must certainly go back to Hegel as the common source
of all these efforts. But I discern a serious contradiction at the origin of sur-
realism: to use Hegelian language, this movement had the concept of totality
(that is what is striking in the famous phrase of Breton, "freedom, color of
man") and realized something quite different in its concrete manifestations.
The totality of man is, indeed, necessarily a synthesis, that is, the organic
and schematic unity of all his secondary structures. A liberation which pro-
poses to be total must start with a total knowledge of man by himself (I am
not trying to show here that it is possible; it is known that I am profoundly
convinced that it is). That does not mean that we must know or that we
can know a priori, the whole anthropological content of human reality, but
that we can first reach ourselves in both the deep and manifest unity of
our behavior, our emotions, and our dreams. Surrealism, the fruit of a par-
ticular epoch, was embarrassed at the start by anti-synthetic survivals: first,
the analytic negativity which is practised on everyday reality. Hegel writes
of scepticism: "Thought becomes perfect thought annihilating the being of
the world in the multiple variety of its determinations, and the negativity of
free self-consciousness at the heart of this multiform configuration of life
becomes real negativity . . > scepticism corresponds to the realization of this

193

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

consciousness, to the negative attitude in regard to the being who is the other;
thus, it corresponds to desire and to work.*' As a matter of fact, what ap-
pears to me essential in surrealist activity is the descent of the negative spirit
into work: sceptical negativity becomes concrete; Duch amp's pieces of sugar
as well as the fox-table are works, that is, concrete and painstaking destruc-
tion of what scepticism destroys only in words. I shall have as much to say
for desire, which is one of the essential structures of surrealist love, and
which is, as we know, desire of consuming, of destroying. We see the distance
that has been covered; it exactly resembles the Hegelian avatars of conscious
ness: bourgeois analytics and idealistic destruction of the world by digestion.
The attitude of the ralli4 writers deserves the name Hegel gave to stoicism:
"It is only a concept of negativity; it raises itself above this life like the spirit
of the master." Surrealism, on the contrary, "penetrates this life like the spirit
of the slave." This is certainly its value and, without any doubt, that is the
way it can hope to join hands with the worker who experiences his freedom
in work. However, the worker destroys in order to construct. By destroying
the tree he constructs beams and boards. Thus, he learns the two aspects of
freedom, which is a constructive negativity. Surrealism, borrowing its methods
from bourgeois analysis, inverts the process; instead of destroying in order
to construct, it constructs in order to destroy. Its construction is always
alienated; it is compounded in a process whose end is annihilation. However,
as the construction is real and the destruction is symbolic, the surrealist object
may also be directly conceived as an end in itself. It is "marble sugar" or a
contestation of sugar, according to the way one looks at it. The surrealist
object is necessarily iridescent because it represents the human order as
topsy-turvy and because, as such, it contains within itself its own contradic-
tion. That is what permits its constructor to claim that he is both destroying
the real and is poetically creating a super-reality beyond reality. In fact,
the super-real thus constructed becomes one object among others in the
world or it is only the crystallized Indication of the possible destruction of
the world. The fox-table of the last Exhibition is as much a syncretic effort
to imbue our flesh with a vague sense of woodiness as it is a reciprocal con-
testation of the inert by the living and the living by the inert. The effort
of the surrealists aims to present these two aspects of their production in the
unity of the same movement. But the synthesis is lacking; the reason is that
our authors do not want it. They are content with presenting the two moments
as blended in an essential unity and, at the same time, as being ach essential,
which does not remove the contradiction. And doubtless the expected result
is achieved: the created object arouses a tension in the mind of the spectator,
and it is this tension which is, strictly speaking, the surrealist instant; the
given thing is destroyed by internal contestation, but the contestation itself
and the destruction are in turn contested by the positive character and the
concrete being-there of the creation. But this irritating iridiscence of the im-
possible is, at bottom, nothing, unless it be Ac irreconcilable divergence be-
tween the two terms of a contradiction. We have a case of technically pro-
voking Baudelairean dissatisfaction. We have no revelation, no intuition of a

194

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

new object, no seizure of matter or content, but only the purely formal con-
sciousness of the mind as a surpassing, an appeal, and an emptiness. I shall
again apply to surrealism Hegel's formula on scepticism: "In (surrealism)
consciousness actually experiences itself as a consciousness contradicting
itself within itself." Will it at least turn in on itself? Will it bring about
a philosophical conversion? Will the surrealist object have the concrete ef-
ficiency of the hypothesis of the evil genius? But a second preconception of
surrealism intervenes at this point: I have shown that it utterly rejects sub-
jectivity as the free arbiter. Its deep love of materiality (the object and the
unfathomable support of its destructions) leads it to profess materialism.
Thus, it immediately covers up the consciousness which it for a moment dis-
covered; it substantiates contradiction. It is no longer a matter of tension
of subjectivity but of an objective structure of the universe. Read The Com"
municating Vessels: the title as well as the text shows the regrettable absence
of any mediation; dream and waking are communicating vessels; that means
that there is a merging, an ebb and flow but not a synthetic unity. I know
perfectly well what will be said: "But this synthetic unity has to be made
and that is precisely the aim which surrealism sets up for itself." "Surrealism,"
says Mezer, "starts from realities distinct from the conscious and the uncon-
scious and goes towaid the synthesis of those components." All well and
good; but with what does it propose to do it? What is the instrument of
mediation?

To see a whole merry-go-round of fairies whirling around a pumpkin (even
if it is possible, which I doubt) is to mix dream and reality; it is not to unify
them in a new form which would retain within it, transformed and surpassed,
elements of the dream and the real In fact, we are always on the level of con-
testation; the real pumpkin supported by the entire real world contests these
fading fairies which run about its rind; and vice-versa, the fairies contest
the gourd. There remains consciousness, tne only witness, the only recourse,
of this reciprocal destruction; but it is not wanted. Whether we paint or
sculpt our dreams, it is sleep which is eaten by waking: the scandalous object,
retrieved by the electric lights, presented in a closed room, in the midst of
other objects, two yards and ten inches from one wall and three yards and
fifteen inches from another, becomes a thing of the world (I place myself
here in the surrealist hypothesis which recognizes the same nature in the use
as in the perception. It is evident that there would not even be any use in dis-
cussing the matter if one thought, as I do, that these natures are radically
distinct) insofar as it is a positive creation and only escapes insofar as it is
a pure negativity. Thus, surrealist man is an addition, a mixture, but never
a synthesis.

It is no accident that our authors owe so much to psychoanalysis; it of-
fered them under the name of "complexes" precisely the model of those con-
tradictory and multiple interpretations which they everywhere make use of
and which are without real cohesion. It is true that "complexes'* exist But
what has not been sufficiently observed is that they can exist only on the
foundation of a previously given synthetic reality. Thus, for surrealism the
total man is only the sum total of all his manifestations. Lacking the synthetic

195

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

idea, they have organized whirligigs of contraries; this flutter of 'being and
non-being might have been able to reveal subjectivity, just as the contradic-
tion of the sensible sent Plato back to intelligible forms; but their rejection
of the subjective has transformed man into a plain haunted house: in that
vague atrium of consciousness there appear and disappear self-destructive ob-
jects which are exactly similar to things. They enter by the eyes or by the
back door. Powerful disembodied voices ring out like those which announced
the death of Pan, This odd collection brings to mind American neo-realism
even more than it does materialism. After this, as a substitute for the syn-
thetic unifications which are effected by consciousness, one will conceive, by
participation, a sort of magical unity which manifests itself capriciously and
which will be called objective chance. But it is not the inverted image of hu-
man activity. One does not liberate a collection; one makes an inventory of it.
And surrealism is just that an inventory. It is only a matter of fighting
against the discredit into which certain portions of the human condition have
fallen. Surrealism is haunted by the ready-made, the solid; it abhors geneses
and births; it never regards creation as an emanation, a passing from the
potential to the act, a gestation; it is the surging up ex nihilo, the abrupt
appearance of a completely formed object which enriches the collection. At
bottom, a discovery. So how could it "deliver man from his monsters"? It
has perhaps killed the monsters, but it has also killed man. It will be said
that there remains desire. The surrealists have wanted to liberate human de-
sire, they have proclaimed that man was desire. But that is not quite true;
they have proscripted a whole category of desires (homosexuality, vices,
etc.), without ever justifying this proscription. Then, they have judged it
conformable to their hatred of the subjective never to come to know desire
except by its products, as psychoanalysis does too. Thus, desire is still a thing,
a collection. But instead of referring back from things (abortive acts, objects
of oneiric symbolism, etc.) to their subjective source (which, strictly speaking,
is desire) the surrealists remain fixed upon the thing. At bottom, desire is
paltry and does not in itself interest them, and then it represents the rational
explanation of the contradictions offered by complexes and their products.
One will find very few and rather vague things in Breton about the uncon-
scious and the libido. What interests him a great deal is not raw desire but
crystallized desire, what might be called, to borrow an expression of Jaspers,
the emblem of desire in the world. What has also struck me among the sur-
realists or ex-surrealists whom I have known has never been the magnificence
of their desires or of their freedom. They have led lives which were modest
and full of restraints; their sporadic violence made me think rather of the
spasms of a maniac than of a concerted action; as for the rest, they were
solidly harpooned by powerful complexes. As far as freeing desire goes, it
has always seemed to me that the great roaring boys of the Renaissance or
even the Romantics did a great deal more. You may say that, at least, they are
great poets. Fine; there we have a meeting-ground. Some naive people have
said that I was "anti-poetic" or "against poetry." What an absurd phrase! As
well say that I am against air or against water. On the contrary, I recognize
in no uncertain terms that surrealism is the only poetic movement of the

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first half of the twentieth century; I even recognize that in a certain way
it contributes to the liberation of man. But what it liberates is neither desire
nor the human totality, but pure imagination. Now, the fact is that the purely
imaginary and praxis are not easily reconciled. I find a touching admission
of this in a surrealist of 1947, whose name seems predisposed to the utmost
honesty:

"I must recognize (and probably I am not alone among those who are not
easily satisfied) that there is a divergence between my feeling of rebellion,
the reality of my life, and the fields of the battle of poetry which I may be
waging, which the works of those who are my friends help me to wage. Despite
them, despite myself, I hardly know how to live.

Does recourse to the imaginary, which is a criticism of the social order,
which is a protestation and a hastening of history, risk burning the bridges
which connect us with other men and, at the same time, with reality? I
know that there can be no question of freedom for man himself." Yves
Bonnefoy,* Surrealism in 1947, P. 68).

But between the two wars surrealism spoke in a quite different tone. And it's
something quite different that I attacked above concerning the surrealists' sing-
ing political manifestoes, their bringing judgment to bear against those
among them who did not stick to the line, their defining a method of social
action, their entering the C.P. and leaving it with a flourish, their rapproche-
ment with Trotsky, and their concern about clarifying their position with
regard to Soviet Russia. It's hard for me to believe that they thought they
were acting as poets. It may be objected that man is a whole and that he
is not to be divided up into a politician and a poet. I agree, and 1 will even
add that I am more at ease for knowing that there are authors who make
poetry a product of automatism and politics a conscious and reflective ef-
iort. But after all it is a truism; it is both true and false. For if man is one
and the same, if, in a way, his mark is found everywhere, that does not at
all mean that the activities are identical; and if, in each case, they bring the
whole mind into question, one need not conclude that they do so in the
same way, nor that the success of one justifies the failures of the other.
Besides, does one think that he would be flattering the surrealists by telling
them that they have been carrying on political activity as poets?

Still, it is reasonable for a writer who wants to mark the unity of his
life and his work to show by a theory the community of aims of his poetry
and his practice. But the fact is that this theory can itself only belong to
prose. There is a surrealist prose, and that is the only thing 1 was consider-
ing in the pages that are under attack. But surrealism is hard to pin
down; it is Proteus. Sometimes it presents itself as completely involved in
reality, struggle, and life; and if you call it to account, it starts screaming
that it's pure poetry and that you're murdering it, and that you don't know
what poetry is all about. This is shown rather clearly in the following anec-
dote which everyone knows but which is pregnant with meaning: Aragon had

* TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. Bonnefoy (la bonne foi) good faith,
honesty. This will explain M. Sartre's play on words in the sentence im-
mediately preceding the quotation.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

On the margin of the prodigal children of the rallies
who found more unexpectedness and madness in their
father's house than on the mountain footpaths and the
trails of the desert, on the margin of the great tenors of
despair, of the prodigal youths for whom the hour for
returning to the fold had not yet struck, there flourished
a discrete humanism. Prevost, Pierre Bost, Chamson, Ave-
line, and Beucler were about the same age as Breton and
Drieu. Their debuts were brilliant; Bost was still a lycee
boy when Copeau performed his The Imbecile; Prevost,
at the cole Normale, was already notorious. But they
remained modest in their budding glory; they had no taste
for playing the Ariels of capitalism. They did not pre-
written a poem which rightly appeared as a provocation to murder; there was
talk of legal prosecution; whereupon, the whole surrealist group solemnly
asserted the irresponsibility of the poet; the products of automatism were
not to be likened to concerted undertakings. However, to anyone who had some
experience with automatic writing, it was apparent that Aragon's poem was
of a quite different kind. Here was a man quivering with indignation, who, in
clear and violent terms, called for the death of the oppressor; the oppressor
was stirred to action, and all at once he found before him nothing more than
a poet who woke up and rubbed his eyes and was amazed that he was being
blamed for his dreams. This is what has just happened again: I attempted a
critical examination of the totality of the fact "surrealism" as an engagement
in the world, insofar as surrealists were attempting, by means of prose, to
make its meanings clear. I was answered that I am harming poets and that I
misunderstand their "contribution" to the inner life. But really, they didn't
give a rap about the inner life; they wanted to shatter it, to break down
the walls between subjective and objective, and to wage the Revolution on
the side of the proletariat.

To conclude: surrealism is entering a period of withdrawal; it is breaking
with Marxism and the C.P. It wants to demolish the Christian-Thomist
edifice stone by stone. Very well, but I should like to know what public it
expects to reach. In other words, in what souls it expects to ruin western
civilization. It has said over and over again that it could not affect the
workers directly and that they were not yet accessible to its action. The
facts show that they are right: how many workers visited the 1947 Exhi-
bition? On the other hand, how many bourgeois? Thus, its purpose can only
be negative: to destroy the last remnants of the Christian myths in the minds
of the bourgeois who form their public. That was what I wanted to show.

/

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tend to be either damned or prophetic. When Prevost
was asked why he wrote, he answered, "To earn my
living." The phrase shocked me at the time because the
last remnant of the great literary myths of the nineteenth
century were still trailing in my head. Nevertheless he
was wrong. One does not write to earn his living. But
what I took for facile cynicism was actually a will to
think toughly, lucidly, and, if need be, disagreeably. These
authors, in complete reaction against satanism and an-
gelism, wanted to be neither saints nor beasts, only men.
Perhaps they were the first writers since romanticism
who did not think of themselves as aristocrats of con-
sumption but rather as workmen in a room, like book-
binders or lacemakers. They did not consider literature
as a trade in order to give themselves license to sell their
wares to the highest bidder, but, on the contrary, to re-
establish themselves, without humility or pride, in an
industrious society. One learns a trade, and then he who
practises it has no right to scorn his clientele. So they too
launched a reconciliation with the public. Much too
honest to believe they had genius and to demand its
rights, they trusted much more to hard work than to
inspiration. They lacked perhaps that absurd confidence
in their destiny, that iniquitous and blind pride which
characterises great men. 1 They all had that strong
self-seeking culture which the Third Republic gave to
its future civil-servants. Thus, almost all of them became
civil-servants, administrative officers in the Senate and

1. Which has particularly characterised them for the last hundred years
because of the misunderstanding which has separated them from the public
and has obliged them to decide upon the marks of their talent themselves.

199

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Chamber, teachers, and curators of museums. But, as
they came for the most part from modest backgrounds
they were not concerned with using their ability to defend
bourgeois traditions. They never enjoyed that culture as
a historic property; they saw in it only a precious instru-
ment for becoming men. Besides, they had in Alain a
master and thinker who detested history. Convinced, like
him, that the moral problem is the same in all ages, they
saw society in an instantaneous cross-section.

Hostile to psychology as well as to the historical sciences,
sensitive to social injustice but too Cartesian to believe
in the class struggle, their only concern was to practise
their trade, against passions and impassioned errors and
against myths, by using without weakness will and
reason. They liked the common people, the Parisian work-
men, the craftsmen, the petty bourgeois, the clerks, the
wayfarers, and the care they took in telling the stories
of these individual destinies sometimes led them into
flirting with populism. But this sequel to naturalism was
different in that they never admitted that social and psy-
chological determinism formed the web and woof of
these humble existences. And, differing from the point of
view of socialist realism, they did want to see their heroes
as hopeless victims of social oppression. In each case,
these moralists applied themselves to showing the role of
will, patience, and effort, presenting deficiencies as faults
and success as merit. They rarely took an interest in ex-
ceptional careers, but they wanted to make people see
that it is possible to be a man even in adversity.

To-day several of them are dead; others are silent or
produce only at long intervals. By and large it can be said

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

that the writers whose debuts were so brilliant and who
around 1927 were able to form a "club of those under
thirty" have almost all fallen by the wayside. To be sure,
individual accidents must be taken into account, but the
fact is so striking that it requires a more general explana-
tion. Indeed, they lacked neither talent nor inspiration,
and from the point of view which concerns us, they must
be regarded as precursors: they renounced the proud
solitude of the writer; they liked their public; they did
not attempt to justify the privileges which they acquired;
they did not meditate upon death or upon the impossible;
rather they wanted to give us rules for living. They were
widely read, certainly much more than the surrealists.
Yet, if one wishes to mark the chief literary tendencies
between the two wars with a name, it is of surrealism that
one will think. What is the reason for their failure?

I believe it is explained, paradoxical as it may seem,
by the public which they chose for themselves. About
1900, on the occasion of its triumph in the Dreyfuss affair,
an industrious and liberal petty bourgeoisie became con-
scious of itself. It was anti-clerical and republican, anti-
racist, individualistic, rationalistic and progressive. Proud
of its institutions, it was ready to modify them but not
overthrow them. It did not scorn the proletariat, but it
felt itself too close to it to be conscious of oppressing it. It
lived moderately, sometimes uneasily, but it aspired not
so much to wealth, or to inaccessible greatness, as it did
to improve its way of life within very narrow limits. Above
all, it wanted to live. To live : by that it meant to choose
a trade, to practise it conscientiously and even passion-
ately, to maintain a certain initiative in one's work, to

201

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

control effectively its political representatives, to express
itself freely in state matters, and to raise its children with
dignity. It was Cartesian in that it distrusted improve-
ments which were too abrupt and in that, contrary to the
romantics who have always hoped that happiness would
burst upon them like a catastrophe, it dreamed rather of
mastering itself than of changing the course of the world.
This class, which has been happily baptized "average, 55
teaches its sons that there is no need for too much and
that the best is the enemy of the good. It is well disposed
toward the demands of the working-class provided that
these remain on a strictly professional level. It has no his-
tory and no historical sense, since, unlike the upper bour-
geoisie, it has neither a past nor traditions, nor, unlike the
working class, does it have immense hope for the future.
As it does not believe in God, but needs very strict im-
peratives to give meaning to the privations which it en-
dures, one of its intellectual concerns has been to establish
a lay morality. The university, which belongs completely
to this average class, strove for twenty years without
success to achieve this through the writings of Durkheim,
Brunschvicg, and Alain. Now, these professors were, di-
rectly or indirectly,, the masters of the writers we are now
considering. These young people, born of the petty bour-
geoisie, taught by petty-bourgeois professors, prepared at
the Sorbonne or in the great schools for petty-bourgeois
professions, returned to their class when they began to
write. Better still, they never left it. They carried over
this morality but improved and subtilized into their
novels and short stories, a morality which everybody was
familiar with but whose principles no one has ever dis-

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

covered. They dwelt upon the beauties and the risks,
upon the austere grandeur of the profession; they sang
not of mad love but rather of conjugal friendship and
that enterprise in common which is marriage. They
founded their humanism upon profession, friendship, so-
cial solidarity, and sport. Thus, the petty bourgeoisie
which already had its political party, Radical Socialism,
its mutual aid society, the League for Human Rights, its
secret society, Freemasonry, and its daily paper, UOeuvre,
had writers, and even a literary weekly, which was called,
symbolically, Marianne. Chamson, Bost, Prevost, and
their friends wrote for a public of civil-servants, univer-
sity people, higher clerks, doctors, and so on. They made
literature Radical Socialist.

Now Radicalism has been the great victim of this war.
By 1910 it had realized its program. For thirty years it
has lived on its momentum. By the time it found its
writers it was already living on its past. To-day it has
definitely disappeared. When the reform of the adminis-
trative personnel and the separation of church and state
had been accomplished, Radical Socialist politics could
become only a matter of opportunism; in order to main-
tain itself for a single moment it presupposed social and
international peace. Two wars in twenty-five years and
the aggravation of the class struggle have been too much
for it; the party has not resisted, but even more than the
party it is the Radical Socialist spirit which has been the
victim of circumstances.

These writers, who did not fight in the first war and
who did not see the second one coming, who did not want
to believe in the exploitation of man by man, and who

203

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

rather bet on the possibility of living honestly and mod-
estly in capitalist society, whom their class of origin
which had become their public deprived of the feeling
for history without giving them, in compensation, a meta-
physical absolute, did not have a sense of the tragic in
one of the most tragic of all eras, nor that of death when
death threatened all Europe, nor that of Evil when so brief
a moment separated them from the most cynical attempt
to debase them. They limited themselves, in all honesty, to
stories of lives which were ordinary and without greatness,
while circumstances were forging careers which were ex-
ceptional in Evil as well as in Good. On the eve of a poetic
springtime more apparent, to be sure, than real
their lucidity dispelled within them that double-dealing
which is one of the sources of poetry; their morality,
which could support the soul in daily life, which perhaps
had supported it during the first world war, was re-
vealed as inadequate for great catastrophes. In such times
man turns toward Epicureanism or Stoicism and these
authors were neither Stoics nor Epicureans 1 or he
asks for help from irrational forces, and they had chosen
to see no farther than the boundary of their reason. Thus,
history stole their public from them as it stole voters from
the Radical Socialist party. They remained silent, I imag-
ine, out of disgust, lacking power to adopt their wisdom
to the follies of Europe. After twenty years of plying their
craft and finding nothing to tell us in the time of misfor-
tune, they have wasted their labor.

So there remains the third generation, our own, which

1. PreVost declared, more than once, his sympathy for Epicurianism as
revised and corrected by Alain.

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

began to write after the defeat or shortly before the war.
I do not want to talk about it before saying something
about the climate in which it appeared. First, the literary
climate : rallies, extremists, and radicals peopled our sky.
Each of these stars exerted, in its way, its own influence
upon our world, and all these influences, combining,
managed to form about us the strangest, most irrational,
and most contradictory idea of what literature is. We
breathed in this idea, which I shall call objective, with
the air of our time. Whatever the effort these writers
did actually make to distinguish themselves from one an-
other, their works were reciprocally contaminated in the
minds of the readers where they co-existed. Moreover,
if the differences are sharp and deep, their works have
common traits. It is striking, at first, that neither the
radicals nor the extremists were concerned with history,
although one side aligned itself with the progressive left
and the other with the revolutionary left. The first were
on the level of Kierkegaardian repetition; the second
were on that of the moment; that is, the aberrant syn-
thesis of eternity and the infinitesimal present. In an age
when we were being crushed by the pressure of history
the literature of the rallies alone offered some taste for
history and some historical sense. But as it was a question
of justifying privileges they envisaged only the action of
the past on the present in the development of societies.
Today, we know the reasons for these refusals, and that
they are social : the surrealists are clerks, the petty bour-
geoisie has neither traditions nor future, the upper bour-
geoisie has done with conquest and aims at maintaining
itself. But these diverse attitudes were compounded to

205

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

produce an objective myth according to which literature
had to choose eternal subjects or at the very least those
which were not of the moment. And then our elders had
only one fictional technique at their disposal, the one
inherited from the French nineteenth century. Now, there
is none more hostile to a historical view of society.

Thus, rallies and radicals have used the traditional
technique; the latter because they were moralists and
intellectuals and wanted to understand matters by their
causes, the former because it served their purposes. By
its systematic denial of change it was better able to bring
out the perenniality of bourgeois virtues. Behind the vain,
forgotten turmoils it let us catch a glimpse of that fixed
and mysterious order, that motionless poetry that they
wished to reveal in their works. Thanks to this technique,
these new Eleatics wrote against the age, against change;
they discouraged agitators and revolutionaries by making
them see their enterprises in the past even before they
had begun.

We learned it by reading their books, and at first it was
our only means of expression. About the time we were
beginning to write, good minds were calculating the "op-
timum time 35 at the end of which a historical event might
be the object of a novel. Fifty years that, it appeared,
was too much; one no longer enters into the thing. Ten
that wasn't enough; one does not have enough perspec-
tive. Thus, we were gently led to see in literature the king-
dom of untimely considerations.

Moreover, these hostile groups made alliances among
themselves; sometimes the radicals became reconciled
with the rallies. After all, they had in common the ambi-

206

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

tion of reconciling themselves with the reader and of
honestly serving his needs. Doubtless their clienteles dif-
fered appreciably, but one passed continually from one
to the other, and the left wing of the public of the ralli6s
formed the right wing of the radical public. On the other
hand, if the radical writers sometimes went along for a
way with traditional politics, if, when the Radical So-
cialist party joined the Popular Front, they all decided
together to collaborate in Vendredi, they never concluded
an alliance with the extreme literary left, that is, with
the surrealists.

The extremists, on the contrary, have this in common,
though reluctantly, with the rallies, that they both hold
that the object of literature is a certain ineffable be-
yondness which can only be suggested and that it is essen-
tially the imaginary realization of the unrealizable. This
is particularly palpable when we are dealing with poetry.
Whereas the radicals banished it, so to speak, from liter-
ature, the novels of the rallies were steeped in it. This
fact, one of the most important in contemporary literary
history, has often been noted; the reason for it has not
been given. What the bourgeois writers really wanted to
prove was that there is no life so bourgeois or so hum-
drum that it has not its poetic beyondness. They con-
sidered themselves catalysts of bourgeois poetry.

At the same time the extremists identified all forms of
artistic activity with poetry, that is, with the inconceivable
beyondness of destruction. Objectively, this tendency was
expressed at the moment we were beginning to write by
the confusion of genres and the mistaken notion of what

207

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the novel is essentially. And it is not rare, even to-day, for
critics to accuse a work of prose of lacking poetry.

This whole literature is literature with a thesis, since
these writers, though they vigorously protest to the con-
trary, all defend ideologies. Extremists and rallies profess
to despise metaphysics. But how shall we name those
endlessly repeated declarations that man is too large for
himself and, by a whole dimension of his being, escapes
psychological and social determinations?

As to the radicals, while proclaiming that literature is
not made with fine feelings, their chief concern was mor-
alizing. In the objective mind, all this is translated by tre-
mendous oscillations of the concept of literature: it is
pure gratuity it is teaching; it exists only by denying
itself and being reborn from its ashes; it is the exquisite,
the impossible, the ineffable beyond language it is an
austere profession which addresses a specific clientele,
tries to clarify its needs, and strives to satisfy them. It is
terror, it is rhetoric. The critics then come along and
try, for their convenience, to unify these opposite con-
cepts; they invent the notion of the message, which we
spoke of earlier.

Everything, to be~sure, is a message. There is a message
of Gide, of Chamson, of Breton, and of course, it is what
they were unwilling to say, what criticism made them say
in spite of themselves. Whence a new theory is added to
the preceding ones; in these delicate and self -destroying
works where the word is only a hesitant guide which stops
half-way and lets the reader continue on his way alone
and whose truth is quite beyond language, in an undif-

208

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

ferentiated silence, it is always the unintentional contri-
bution of the writer which has chief importance.

A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes
its author. If he paints himself without planning to, if
his characters escape his control and impose their whims
upon him, if the words maintain a certain independence
under his pen, then he does his best work. Boileau would
be completely dumbfounded if he read this kind of state-
ment, which one frequently finds in the articles of our
critics: "the author knows too well what he wants to say;
he is too lucid; the words come too easily; he does what-
ever he wants with his pen; he is not dominated by his
subject. 55

Unfortunately, everybody is in agreement on this point.
For the rallies, the essence of the work is the poetry, thus,
the beyond and, by an imperceptible gliding, which es-
capes the author himself, the part of the Devil. For the
surrealist the only valid mode of writing is automatism.
Even the radicals, following Alain, insist that a work of
art is never finished until it has become a collective rep-
resentation and that it then contains, by virtue of all
that generations of readers have put into it, infinitely
more than at the moment of its conception.

This idea, which, moreover, is correct, amounts to
making evident the reader's role in the constitution of the
work; but at the time it helped increase the confusion. In
short, the objective myth inspired by these contradictions
is that every lasting work has its secret.

Well and good, if it were a secret of fabrication; but
no, it starts at the point where technique and will leave
off. Something from above is reflected in the work of art

209

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

and breaks like sunlight on the waves. To put it briefly,
from pure poetry to automatic writing the literary climate
is Platonism. In this mystical epoch which is without
faith, or rather dishonestly mystical, a major literary
current leads the writer to surrender before his work as
a political current leads him to surrender before the
party. It is said that Fra Angelico painted on his knees;
if that is true, many writers resemble him, but go much
further than he; they think that it is enough to write on
one's knees to write well.

When we were still schoolboys on the lycee benches or
in the Sorbonne amphitheatres, the leafy shadow of the
beyond spread itself over literature. We knew the bitter
and deceptive taste of the impossible, of purity, of impos-
sible purity. We felt ourselves to be in turn the unsatis-
fied and the Ariels of accomplishment. We believed that
one could save his life by art, and then, the following
term, that one never saved anything and that art was
the lucid and desperate balance sheet of our perdition.
We swung between terror and rhetoric, between liter-
ature-as-martyrdom and literature-as-profession. If some-
one were to amuse himself by carefully reading our writ-
ings he would doubtless find there, like scars, the traces
of these varying temptations but he would have to have
time to waste.

That is all very far away from us now. However, since it
is by writing that the author forges his ideas on the art
of writing, the collectivity lives on the literary concep-
tions of the preceding generation, and the critics who
have understood them twenty years late are quite happy
to use them as touchstones to judge contemporary works.

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

The literature of the period between the wars has a
hard time of it these days. Georges Bataille's reflections
on the impossible do not have the value of the slightest
surrealistic tract. His theory of expense is a feeble echo of
great days which are past. Lettrism is a substitute prod-
uct, a flat and conscientious imitation of Dadaist exuber-
ance. One's heart is no longer in it; one feels the applica-
tion and the haste to succeed. Neither Andre Dhotel nor
Marius Groult are worth Alain Fournier. Many former
surrealists have joined the Communist Party like the
Saint Simonians who, around 1880, turned up on boards
of directors of big business. Neither Cocteau nor Mauriac
nor Green has any challengers ; Giraudoux has a hundred,
but all mediocre. Most of the radicals are silent. The
reason is that the gap has been revealed not between the
author and his public which, after all, would be in the
great literary tradition but between the literary myth
and the historical reality.

We started feeling this gap about 1930, quite a while
before publishing our first books. 1 It was about this
time that most Frenchmen were stupefied on discovering

1. If I did not speak of Marlaux or Saint-Exupry earlier, it is because
they belong to our generation. They were writing before we were and are
doubtless a little older than we. But whereas we needed the urgency and the
physical reality of a conflict in order to discover ourselves, Malraux had the
immense merit of recognizing as early as his first work that we were at war and
of producing a war literature when the surrealists and even Drieu were devoting
themselves to a literature of peace. As to Saint-Exupery, against the sub-
jectivism and the quietism of our predecessors he was able to sketch the
chief features of a literature of work and tool. I shall show later that he is the
precursor of a literature of construction which tends to replace the literature of
consumption. War and construction, heroism and work, doing, having and
being it will be seen, at the end of this chapter, that these are the chief
literary and philosophical themes of today. Consequently, when I say "we",
I believe that I can speak of them too.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

their historicity. They had, of course, learned at school
that man plays and wins or loses in the womb of univer-
sal history, but they did not apply it to their own case.
They thought in a vague sort of way that it was all right
for the dead to be historical. The striking thing about
lives of the past is that they always unfold on the eve of
the great events which exceed forecasts, disappoint ex-
pectations, upset plans, and bring new lights to bear on
the years that have gone by. We have here a case of
trickery, a perpetual juggling, as if men were all like
Charles Bovary who, discovering after his wife's death
the letters she had received from her lovers, all at once
saw twenty years of conjugal happiness which had al-
ready been lived slipping away.

In the century of the airplane and electricity we did
not think that we were exposed to these surprises. It
didn't seem to us that we were on the eve of anything.
On the contrary, we had the vague pride of feeling that
it was the day after the last disruption of history. Even if
we were at times disturbed by German re-armament, we
thought that we were moving on a long, straight road
and we felt certain that our lifetime would be uniquely
woven of individual circumstances and marked by scien-
tific discoveries and happy reforms.

From 1930 on, the world depression, the coming of
Nazism, and the events in China opened our eyes. It
seemed as if the ground were going to fall from under
us, and suddenly, for us too, the great historical juggling
began. The first years of the great world Peace suddenly
had to be regarded as the years between wars. Each sign
of promise which we had greeted had to be seen as a

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threat. Each day we had lived revealed its true face; we
had abandoned ourselves to it trustingly and it was lead-
ing us to a new war with secret rapidity, with a rigor
hidden beneath its nonchalant airs. And our life as an in-
dividual which had seemed to depend upon our efforts,
our virtues, and our faults, on our good and bad luck,
on the good and bad will of a very small number of peo-
ple, seemed governed down to its minutest details by ob-
scure and collective forces, and its most private circum-
stances seemed to reflect the state of the whole world.
All at once we felt ourselves abruptly situated.

The detachment which our predecessors were so fond
of practising had become impossible. There was a col-
lective adventure which was taking form in the future
and which would be our adventure. That was what
would later permit our generation, with its Ariels and
its Calibans, to be dated. Something was awaiting us in
the future shadow, something which would reveal us to
ourselves, perhaps in the illumination of a last moment,
before annihilating us. The secret of our gestures and
our most intimate designs lay ahead of us in the catas-
trophe to which our names would be attached.

Historicity flowed in upon us; in everything we
touched, in the air we breathed, in the page we read,
in the one we wrote; in love itself we discovered, like
a taste of history, so to speak, a bitter and ambiguous
mixture of the absolute and the transitory. What need
had we patiently to construct self-destructive objects
since each of the moments of our life was subtly whisked
away from us at the very time that we were enjoying it,
since each prevent that we lived with gusto, like an ab-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

solute, was struck with a secret death, seemed to us to
have its meaning outside of itself, for other eyes which
had not yet seen the light, and, in a way, to be already
past in its very presence? Besides, what did surrealist de-
struction, which leaves everything in place, matter to us,
when a destruction by sword and fire threatened every-
thing, surrealism included?

It was, I believe, Miro who painted a Destruction of
Painting. But incendiary bombs could destroy the paint-
ing and its destruction together. We would no longer
have dreamed of crying up the exquisite virtues of the
bourgeoisie. To do that we would have had to believe
that they were eternal, but did we know whether the
French bourgeoisie would exist tomorrow? Nor of teach-
ing, as the radicals had done, the means of leading in
peace-time the life of an honest man, when our greatest
care was to know whether one could remain a man in
war-time.

The pressure of history suddenly revealed to us the
interdependence of nations. An incident in Shanghai was
a scissor-stroke in our destiny, but at the same time it
replaced us, in spite of ourselves, in the national col-
lectivity. We very soon had to realize that the traveling
of our elders, their sumptuous voyages abroad, and the
whole ceremonial of tourism on the grand scale, was an
illusion. Everywhere they went they carried France with
them. They travelled because France had won the war
and the exchange was favorable. They followed the franc.
Like the franc, they had more access to Seville and
Palermo than to Zurich and Amsterdam.

As for us, when we were old enough to make our

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world tour, autarchy had killed off the novels about the
grand tour, and then, we no longer had the heart to
travel. With a perverse taste for standardizing the world,
they amused themselves with finding the imprint of
capitalism everywhere. We would have found, without
any difficulty, a much more obvious uniformity
cannons everywhere. And then, whether travellers or
not, in the face of the conflict which threatened our
country, we had understood that we were not citizens of
the world since we could not make ourselves be Swiss,
Swedish, or Portuguese. The destiny of our works them-
selves were bound to that of a France in danger. Our
elders wrote for idle souls, but for the public which we,
in our turn, were going to address the vacation was
over. It was composed of men of our sort who, like us,
were expecting war and death. For these readers with-
out leisure, occupied without respite with a single con-
cern, there was only one fitting subject. It was about their
war and their death that we had to write. Brutally re-
integrated into history, we had no choice but to produce
a literature of historicity.

But what makes our position original, I believe, is
that the war and the occupation, by precipitating us into
a world in a state of fusion, perforce made us rediscover
the absolute at the heart of relativity itself. For our pred-
ecessors the rule of the game was to save everybody,
because suffering is atoned for, because nobody is bad
voluntarily, because man's heart is unfathomable, be-
cause divine grace is shared equally. That meant that
literature apart from the Surrealist extreme left which
simply spread mischief tended to establish a sort of

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

moral relativism. Christians no longer believed in hell.
Sin was the place devoid of God; carnal love was love
of God gone astray.

As democracy tolerated all opinions, even those which
aimed expressly at destroying it, republican humanism,
which was taught in the schools, made tolerance the
primary virtue. Everything would be tolerated, even in-
tolerance. Hidden truths had to be recognized in the sil-
liest ideas, in the vilest feelings. For Leon Brunschvicg,
the philosopher of the regime, who all his life assimilated,
unified, and integrated, and who shaped three genera-
tions, evil and error were only false shows, fruits of sep-
aration, limitation, and finiteness. They were annihilated
as soon as one overthrew the barriers which compart-
mentalized systems and collectivities.

The radicals followed Auguste Comte in this, that they
held progress to be the development of order; thus, order
was already there, in posse, like the hunter's cap in the
illustrated puzzles. It was only a matter of discovering
it. That was how they passed their time; it was their
spiritual exercise. They thereby justified everything
starting with themselves.

The Marxists at .least recognized the reality of oppres-
sion and capitalist imperialism, of the class struggle and
misery. But the effect of dialectical materialism, as I have
shown elsewhere, is to make Good and Evil vanish con-
jointly. There remains only the historical process, and
then Stalinist communism does not attribute so much im-
portance to the individual that his sufferings and even
his death cannot be redeemed if they help to hasten the
day when power is seized.

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The notion of Evil, which had been abandoned, had
fallen into the hands of some Manichaeans Anti-
Semites, fascists, anarchists of the right who used it to
justify their bitterness, their envy, and their lack of un-
derstanding of history. That was enough to discredit it.
For political realism as for philosophical idealism Evil
was not a very serious matter.

We have been taught to take it seriously. It is neither
our fault nor our merit if we lived in a time when
torture was a daily fact. Chateaubriand, Oradour, the
Rue des Saussaies, Tulle, Dachau, and Auschwitz have
all demonstrated to us that Evil is not an appear-
ance, that knowing its cause does not dispel it, that it is
not opposed to Good as a confused idea is to a clear one,
that is not the effects of passions which might be cured,
of a fear which might be overcome, of a passing aberra-
tion which might be excused, of an ignorance which
might be enlightened, that it can in no way be diverted,
brought back, reduced, and incorporated into idealistic
humanism, like that shade of which Leibnitz has written
that it is necessary for the glare of daylight.

Satan, Maritain once said, is pure. Pure, that is, with-
out mixture and without remission. We have learned to
know this horrible, this irreducible purity. It blazes forth
in the close and almost sexual rapport between the execu-
tioner and his victim. For torture is first of all a matter of
debasement. Whatever the sufferings which have been
endured, it is the victim who decides, as a last resort,
what the moment is when they are unbearable and when
he must talk. The supreme irony of torture is that the
sufferer, if he breaks down and talks, applies his will as

217

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

a man to denying that he is a man, makes himself the
accomplice of his executioners and, by his own movement,
precipitates himself into abjection. The executioner is
aware of this; he watches for this weakness, not only be-
cause he will obtain the information he desires, but be-
cause it will prove to him once again that he is right in us-
ing torture and that man is an animal who must be led
with a whip. Thus, he attempts to destroy the humanity in
his fellow-creature. Also, as a consequence, in himself; he
knows that the groaning, sweating, filthy creature who begs
for mercy and abandons himself in a swooning consent
with the moanings of an amorous woman, and who
yields everything and is even so carried away that he im-
proves upon his betrayals because the consciousness that
he has done evil is like a stone around his neck dragging
him still farther down, exists also in his own image and
that he the executioner is bearing down upon him-
self as much as upon his victim. If he wishes, on his own
account, to escape this total degradation, he has no other
recourse than to affirm his blind faith in an iron order
which like a corset confines our repulsive weaknesses in
short, to commit man's destiny to the hands of inhuman
powers.

A moment comes when torturer and tortured are in
accord, the former because he has, in a single victim,
symbolically gratified his hatred of all mankind, the latter
because he can bear his failing only by pushing it to the
limit, and because the only way he can endure his self-
hatred is by hating all other men along with himself.
Later, perhaps, the executioner will be hanged. Perhaps
the victim, if he recovers, will be redeemed. But what will

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

blot out this Mass in which two freedoms have com-
muned in the destruction of the human? We knew that,
to a certain extent, it was being celebrated everywhere in
Paris while we were eating, sleeping, and making love.
We heard whole blocks screaming and we understood
that Evil, fruit of a free and sovereign will, is, like Good,
absolute.

Perhaps a day will come when a happy age, looking
back at the past, will see in this suffering and shame one
of the paths which led to peace. But we were not on the
side of history already made. We were, as I have said,
situated in such a way that every lived minute seemed to
us like something irreducible. Therefore, in spite of our-
selves, we came to this conclusion, which will seem shock-
ing to lofty souls: Evil cannot be redeemed.

But, on the other hand, most of the resisters, though
beaten, burned, blinded, and broken, did not speak. They
broke the circle of Evil and reaffirmed the human for
themselves, for us, and for their very torturers. They did
it without witness, without help, without hope, often
even without faith. For them it was not a matter of be-
lieving in man but of wanting to. Everything conspired
to discourage them: so many indications everywhere
about them, those faces bent over them, that misery
within them. Everything concurred in making them be-
lieve that they were only insects, that man is the impossi-
ble dream of spies and squealers, and that they would
awaken as vermin like everybody else.

This man had to be invented with their martyrized
flesh, with their hunted thoughts which were already
betraying them invented on the basis of nothing, for

219

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

nothing, in absolute gratuity. For it is within the human
that one can distinguish means and ends, values and pref-
erences, but they were still at the creation of the world
and they had only to decide in sovereign fashion whether
there would be anything more than the reign of the ani-
mal within it. They remained silent and man was born
of their silence. We knew that every moment of the day,
in the four corners of Paris, man was a hundred times
destroyed and reaffirmed.

Obsessed as we were by these tortures, a week did not
go by that we did not ask ourselves: "Suppose I were
tortured, what would I do?" And this question alone car-
ried us to the very frontiers of ourselves and of the human.
We oscillated between the no-man's-land where mankind
denies itself and the barren desert from which it surges
and creates itself. Those who had immediately preceded
us in the world, who had bequeathed us their culture,
their wisdom, their customs, and their proverbs, who had
built the houses that we lived in and who had marked the
routes with the statues of their great men, practiced
modest virtues and remained in the moderate regions.
Their faults never caused them to fall so low that they
did not find others^ beneath them who were more guilty,
nor did their merits cause them to rise so high that they
did not see other souls above them whose merit was
greater. Their gaze encountered men farther than the eye
can reach. The very sayings they made use of and which
we had learned from them "a fool always finds a big-
ger fool to admire him," "we always need someone smaller
than ourselves" their very manner of consoling them-
selves in affliction by telling themselves that, whatever

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their unhappines, there were others worse off, all
goes to show that they considered mankind as a natural
and infinite milieu that one could never leave and whose
limits could not be touched. They died with a good con-
science and without ever having explored their condition.

Because of this, their writers gave them a literature
of average situations. But we could no longer find it nat-
ural to be men when our best friends, if they were taken,
could choose only between abjection and heroism, that
is, between the two extremes of the human condition, be-
yond which there is no longer anything. If they were
cowards and traitors, all men were above them; if heroic,
all men were below them. In the latter case, which was
the more frequent, they no longer felt humanity as a
limitless milieu. It was a thin flame within them which
they alone kept alive. It kept itself going in the silence
which they opposed to their executioners. About them
was nothing but the great polar night of the inhuman and
of unknowingness, which they did not even see, which
they divined in the glacial cold which transpierced them.

Our fathers always had witnesses and examples avail-
able. For these tortured men, there were no longer any,
It was Saint-Exupery who said in the course of a dan-
gerous mission, "I am my own witness." The same for
all of them; anguish and forlornness and the sweating of
blood begin for a man when he can no longer have any
other witness than himself. It is then that he drains the
cup, that he experiences his human condition to the bit-
ter end. Of course, we are quite far from having all felt
this anguish, but it haunted us like a threat and a promise.

Five years. We lived entranced and as we did not take

221

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

our profession of writer lightly, this state of trance still
reflects itself in our writings. We have undertaken to
create a literature of extreme situations. I am not at all
claiming that in this we are superior to our elders. Quite
the contrary. Bloch-Michel, who has earned the right to
talk, has said that fewer virtues are needed in great cir-
cumstances than in small. It is not for me to decide
whether he is right or whether it is better to be a Jansen-
ist than a Jesuit. I rather think that there must be some-
thing of everything and that the same man cannot be one
and the other at the same time.

Therefore, we are Jansenists because the age has made
us such, and insofar as it has made us touch our limits I
shall say that we are all metaphysical writers. I think
that many among us would deny this designation or would
not accept it without reservations, but this is the result of
a misunderstanding. For metaphysics is not a sterile dis-
cussion about abstract notions which have nothing to do
with experience. It is a living effort to embrace from
within the human condition in its totality.

Forced by circumstances to discover the pressure of his-
tory, as Torricelli discovered atmospheric pressure, and
tossed by the cruelty of the time into that forlornness from
where one can see our condition as man to the very limit,
to the absurd, to the night of unknowingness, we have a
task for which we may not be strong enough (this is not
the first time that an age, for want of talents, has lacked
its art and its philosophy). It is to create a literature
which unites and reconciles the metaphysical absolute and
the relativity of the historical fact, and which I shall call,
for want of a better name, the literature of great circum-

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

stances. 1 It is not a question for us of escaping into the
eternal or of abdicating in the face of what the unspeak-
able Mr. Zaslavsky calls in Pravda the "historical proc-

ess. 55

The questions which our age puts to us and which re-
main our questions are of another order. How can one
make himself a man in, by, and for history? Is there a
possible synthesis between our unique and irreducible con-
sciousness and our relativity; that is, between a dogmatic
humanism and a perspectivism? What is the relationship
between morality and politics? How, considering our
deeper intentions, are we to take up the objective
consequences of our acts? We can rigorously attack these
problems in the abstract by philosophical reflection. But
if we want to live them, to support our thoughts by those
fictive and concrete experiences which are what novels
are, we have at our disposal the technique which I have
already analyzed here and whose ends are rigorously op-
posed to our designs. Specially perfected to relate the
events of an individual life within a stable society,
it enabled the novelist to record, describe, and ex-
plain the weakening, the vections, the involutions, and the
slow disorganization of a particular system in the middle
of a universe at rest. But from 1940 on, we found our-
selves in the midst of a cyclone. If we wished to orient
ourselves in it we suddenly found ourselves at grips with

1. What are Camus, Marlaux, Koestler, etc. now producing if not a liter-
ature of extreme situations? Their characters are at the height of power or
in prison cells, on the eve of death or of being tortured or of killing. Wars,
coups d'tat, revolutionary action! bombardments, massacres. There you have
their everyday life. On every page, in every line, it is always the whole man
who is in question.

223

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

a problem of a higher order of complexity, exactly as
a quadratic equation is more complex than a linear. It
was a matter of describing the relationship of different
partial systems to the total system which contains them
when both are in movement and the movements condi-
tion each other reciprocally.

In the stable world of the pre-war French novel, the
author, placed at a gamma point which represented abso-
lute rest, had fixed guide-marks at his disposal to deter-
mine the movements of his characters. But we, involved in
a system in full evolution, could only know relative move-
ments. Whereas our predecessors thought that they could
keep themselves outside of history and that they had
soared to heights from which they could judge events as
they really were, circumstances have plunged us into our
time. But since we were in it, how could we see it as a
whole? Since we were situated, the only novels we could
dream of were novels of situation, without internal nar-
rators or all-knowing witnesses. In short, if we wished to
give an account of our age, we had to make the technique
of the novel shift from Newtonian mechanics to general-
ized relativity; we had to people our books with minds
that were half lucid and half overcast, some of which we
might consider with more sympathy than others, but none
of which would have a privileged point of view either
upon the event or upon himself. We had to present crea-
tures whose reality would be the tangled and contradic-
tory tissue of each one's evaluations of all the other char-
acters himself included and the evaluation by all
the others of himself, and who could never decide from
within whether the changes of their destinies came from

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

their own efforts, from their own faults, or from the
course of the universe.

Finally, we had to leave doubts, expectations, and the
unachieved throughout our works, leaving it up to the
reader to conjecture for himself by giving him the feeling,
without giving him or letting him guess our feeling, that
his view of the plot and the characters was merely one
among many others.

But, on the other hand, as I have just pointed out, our
very historicity reinstated us because from day to day we
were living that absolute which it had seemed at first to
take away from us. If our plans, our passions, and our
acts were explicable and relative from the viewpoint of
past history, they again took on in this forlornness the
uncertainty and the risks of the present, their irreducible
density.

We were not unaware of the fact that a time would
:ome when historians would be able to survey from all
ingles this stretch of time which we lived feverishly
iiinute by minute, when they would illuminate our past
3y our future and would decide upon the value of our
andertakings by their outcome and upon the sincerity of
)ur intentions by their success. But the irreversibility of
xir age belonged only to us. We had to save or lose our-
;elves gropingly in this irreversible time. These events
Dounced upon us like thieves and we had to do our job
n the face of the incomprehensible and the untenable, to
)et, to conjecture without evidence, to undertake in un-
:ertainty and persevere without hope. Our age would be
explained, but no one could keep it from having been in-
explicable to us. No one could remove the bitter taste,

225

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the taste it will have had for us alone and which will
disappear with us.

The novels of our elders related the event as having
taken place in the past. Chronological order permitted
the reader to see the logical and universal relationship,
the eternal verities. The slightest change was already
understood. A past was delivered to us which had al-
ready been thought through. Perhaps two centuries from
now an author who may decide to write a historical novel
about the war of 1940 may find this a suitable technique.
But if it occurred to us to meditate on our future writings,
we were convinced that no art could really be ours if it
did not restore to the event its brutal freshness, its am-
biguity, its unforeseeability, if it did restore to time its
actual course, to the world its rich and threatening opac-
ity, and to man his long patience.

We did not want to delight our public with its superior-
ity to a dead world we wanted to take it by the throat.
Let every character be a trap, let the reader be caught
in it, and let him be tossed from one consciousness to an-
other as from one absolute and irremediable universe to
another similarly absolute; let him be uncertain of the
very uncertainty of the heroes, disturbed by thfir dis-
turbance, flooded with their present, docile beneath the
weight of their future, invested with their perceptions
and feelings as by high insurmountable cliffs. In short,
let him feel that every one of their moods and every
movement of their minds encloses all mankind and is, in
its time and place, in the womb of history and, despite
the perpetual juggling of the present by the future, a
descent without recourse toward Evil or an ascent toward

226

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

Good which no future will be able to contest. This is what
explains the success we have accorded Kafka's works and
those of the American novelists. As for Kafka, everything
has been said: that he wanted to paint a picture of bu-
reaucracy, the progress of disease, the condition of the
Jews in eastern Europe, the quest for inaccessible tran-
scendence, and the world of grace when grace is lacking.
This is all true. Let me say that he wanted to describe
the human condition. But what we were particularly
sensitive to was that this trial perpetually in session, which
ends abruptly and evilly, whose judges are unknown and
out of reach, in the vain efforts of the accused to know
the leaders of the prosecution, in this defense patiently
assembled which turns against the defender and figures
in the evidence for the prosecution, in this absurd present
which the characters live with great earnestness and
whose keys are elsewhere, we recognize history and our-
selves in history.

We were far from Flaubert and Mauriac. There was in
Kafka, at the very least, a new way of presenting destinies
which were tricked and undermined at their foundation,
which were lived minutely, ingeniously, and modestly,
of rendering the irreducible truth of appearances and of
making felt beyond them another truth which will always
be denied us. One does not imitate Kafka. One does not
rewrite him. One had to extract a precious encourage-
ment from his books and look elsewhere.

As for the Americans, it was not their cruelty or pes-
simism which moved us. We recognized in them men
who had been swamped, lost in too large a continent as
we were in history and who tried, without traditions, with

227

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the means available, to render their stupor and forlornness
in the midst of incomprehensible events. The success of
Faulkner, Hemingway, and Dos Passos was not the ef-
fect of snobbism, or at least, not at first. It was the de-
fense reflex of a literature which, feeling itself threatened
because its techniques and its myths were no longer go-
ing to allow it to cope with the historical situation, grafted
foreign methods upon itself in order to be able to ful-
fill its function in new situations.

Thus, at the very moment that we were facing the pub-
lic, circumstances forced us to break with our predecessors.
They had chosen literary idealism and had presented us
with events through a privileged subjectivity. For us, his-
torical relativism, by positing the a priori equivalent of all
subjectivities, 2 restored to the living event all its value and

2. Of course, some minds are richer than others, more intuitive, or better
qualified for analysis or synthesis. Some of them are even prophetic and some
are in a better position to foresee because they hold certain cards in their
hand or because they discern a broader horizon. But these differences are
a posteriori and the evaluation of the present and the near future remains
conjectural. For us too the event appears only through subjectivities. But its
transcendence conies from the fact that it exceeds them all because it extends
through them and reveals to each person a different aspect of itself and of
himself.

Thus, our technical problem is to find an orchestration of consciousnesses
which may permit us t<* render the multidimensionality of the event. Moreover,
in giving up the fiction of the omniscient narrator, we have assumed the obliga-
tion of suppressing the intermediaries between the reader and the subjec-
tivities the viewpoints of our characters. It is a matter of having him enter
into their minds as into a windmill. He must even coincide successively with
each one of them. We have learned from Joyce to look for a second kind
of realism, the raw realism of subjectivity without mediation or distance.
Which leads us to profess a third realism, that of temporality. Indeed, if
without mediation we plunge the reader into a consciousness, if we refuse him
all means of surveying the whole, then the time of this consciousness must be
imposed upon him without abridgment. If I pack six months into a single
page, the reader jumps out of the book.

This last aspect raises difficulties that none of us has resolved and which

228

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

led us back, in literature, to dogmatic realism by way of
absolute subjectivism. They thought that they were justi-
fying, at least apparently, the foolish business of story-
telling by ceaselessly bringing to the reader's attention, ex-
plicitly or by allusion, the existence of an author. We hope
that our books remain in the air all by themselves and
that their words, instead of pointing backwards toward
the one who has designed them, will be toboggans, for-
gotten, unnoticed, and solitary, which will hurl the reader
into the midst of a universe where there are no witnesses;
in short, that our books may exist in the manner of
things, of plants, of events, and not at first like prod-
ucts of man. We want to drive providence from our works
as we have driven it from our world. We should, I believe,
no longer define beauty by the form nor even by the mat-
ter, but by the density of being. 3

I have shown how "retrospective 55 literature denotes
the taking of a position from which one surveys the whole
of society and how those who choose to narrate from the
viewpoint of past history seek to deny their body, their

are perhaps partially insoluble, for it is neither possible nor desirable to limit
all novels to the story of a single day. Even if one should resign himself to
that, the fact would remain that devoting a book to twenty-four hours rather
than to one, or to an hour rather than to a minute, implies the intervention of
the author and a transcendent choice. It will then be necessary to mask this
choice by purely aesthetic procedures, to practice sleight of hand, and, as al-
ways in art, to lie in order to be true.

3. From this viewpoint, absolute objectivity, that is, the story in the third
person which presents characters solely by their conduct and words without
explanation or incursion into their inner life, while preserving strict chrono-
logical order, is rigorously equivalent to absolute subjectivity. Logically, to be
sure, it might be claimed that there is at least a witnessing consciousness, that
of the reader. But the fact is that the reader forgets to see himself while
he looks and the story retains for him the innocence of a virgin forest whose
trees grow far from sight.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

historicity, and the irreversibility of time. This leap into
the eternal is the direct effect of the divorce which I have
pointed out between the writer and his public. Vice-versa,
it will be understood without difficulty that our decision
to re-integrate the absolute into history is accompanied
by an effort to confirm this reconciliation of author and
reader which the radicals and the rallies had already
undertaken.

When the writer thinks that he has pathways to the
eternal, he is beyond comparison. He has the benefit of
an illumination which he can not communicate to the
vulgar throng which crawls beneath him. But if it has
occurred to him to think that one does not escape his
class by fine sentiments, that there is no privileged con-
sciousness anywhere, that belles-lettres are not lettres de
noblesse, that the best way to be bowled over by one's
age is to turn one's back on it or to pretend to be above
it, and that one does not transcend it by running away
from it but by taking hold of it in order to change it, that
is, by going beyond it toward the immediate future, then
he is writing for everybody and with everybody because
the problem which he is trying to solve by means of his
own talents is everybody's problem. Besides, those among
us who collaborated in the underground newspapers ad-
dressed themselves in their articles to the whole com-
munity. We were not prepared for this kind of thing and
we turned out to be not very clever; the literature of
resistance did not produce anything to get excited about.
But this experience made us feel what a literature of the
concrete universal might be.

In these anonymous articles we practised, in general,

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

only pure negativity. In the face of a manifest opposition
and the myth it was shaping from day to day to sustain
itself, spirituality was dissent. Most of the time our job
was to criticize a political action, to denounce an arbi-
trary measure, to warn against a man or against propa-
ganda, and when we happened to glorify someone who
had been deported or shot, it was for having had the
courage to say no. Against the vague and synthetic no-
tions which were crammed into us day and night, Europe,
Race, the Jew, the anti-bolshevik crusade, we had to re-
awaken the old spirit of analysis which alone was capable
of tearing them to pieces. Thus, our function seemed a
humble echo of the one which the eighteenth-century
writers had so brilliantly fulfilled. But as we could not
address the oppressor, as Diderot and Voltaire could,
except by literary fiction, be it only to have made them
ashamed of their oppression, as we never had relations
with them, we did not have the illusion of these authors
that we were escaping our oppressed condition by prac-
tising our profession.

On the contrary, from within oppression itself we
depicted to the oppressed collectivity of which we were
part its anger and its hopes. With more luck, more
skill, more talent, more cohesion, and more drive, we
might have been able to write the interior monologue of
occupied France. Moreover, even if we might have man-
aged it, there would have been no reason for glorifying
us inordinately. The National Front grouped its members
by profession. Those among us who worked for the Re-
sistance in their specialty could not ignore the fact that
the doctors, the engineers, and the railway workers were,

231

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

in their speciality, doing a job of far greater importance.

Whatever the case may be there was the risk that after
the liberation this attitude, which was easy for us be-
cause of the great tradition of literary negativity, might
turn into systematic negation and might once again
bring about the divorce of writer and public; because
we were at war, we glorified all forms of destruction;
desertions, refusals to obey, derailing of trains, setting
harvests on fire, and criminal attacks.

The war was over. By persisting in this attitude, we
might have joined the surrealist group and all those
who make of art a permanent and radical form of de-
struction. But 1945 does not resemble 1918. It was fine
to invoke the flood upon a victorious and smug France
which thought that it would dominate Europe. The flood
has come. What remains to be destroyed? The great
metaphysical destruction of the other post-war period
was carried on joyously, in a spirit of unleashed explosion.
To-day, there is the threat of war, famine, and dictator-
ship. We are again super-charged. 1918 was holiday- time.
A bonfire might be built of twenty centuries of culture
and accumulations. To-day the fire would go out by it-
self or would refuse to catch. It will be a long time before
the holiday season comes round again.

In this age of lean cows, literature refuses to link its
destiny to that of consumption, which is too precarious.
In a rich oppressive society art can still be taken for
the supreme luxury because luxury seems the mark of
civilization. But to-day luxury has lost its sacred char-
acter. The black market has turned it into a phenom-
enon of social disintegration. It has lost the aspect of

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

"conspicuous consumption" which made up half its
charm. One hides himself in order to consume; one
isolates himself; one is no longer at the top of the social
hierarchy, but on the margin. An art of pure consump-
tion would be neither here nor there. It would no longer
be supported by solid luxury, whether culinary or sar-
torial. It might just barely provide a handful of privi-
leged souls with solitary escapes, onanistic pleasures,
and the opportunity to miss the old sweetness of living.

When the whole of Europe is preoccupied before
everything else with reconstruction, when nations de-
prive themselves of necessities in order to export, liter-
ature, (which, like the Church, adapts itself to all situa-
tions and saves itself, come what may) reveals its other
face. Writing is not living. Neither is it running away
from life in order to contemplate Platonic essences and
the archetype of beauty in a world at rest. Nor is it
letting oneself be slashed, as by swords, by words which,
unfamiliar and not understood, come up to us from be-
hind. It is the practising of a profession, a profession
which requires an apprenticeship, sustained work, profes-
sional consciousness, and the sense of responsibility.

It is not we who have discovered these responsibilities.
Quite the contrary. For a hundred years the writer has
been dreaming of giving himself to his art in a sort of
innocence, beyond Good and Evil, and, so to speak, be-
fore the fall. It is society which has just laid our burdens
and our duties on our shoulders. It must think that we
are quite formidable since it condemned to death a hun-
dred of us who collaborated with the enemy while it left
manufacturers who were guilty of the same crime at

233

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

liberty. It is said nowadays that it was better to build
the Atlantic wall than to talk about it, I don't find that
particulary scandalizing.

To be sure, it is because we are pure consumers that
the collectivity proves to be pitiless toward us. An author
shot is one mouth less to feed. The least important pro-
ducer would be a greater loss to the nation. 1 And I am
not saying that this is just. On the contrary, it opens the
way to all abuses, to censorship, to persecution. But we
ought to rejoice that our profession involves some dan-
gers. When we wrote clandestinely, the risks for us were
Kiinimal, but for the printers they were considerable.
It often made me feel ashamed. At least it taught us to
practise a sort of verbal deflation. When each word
might cost a life, you ought not take time off to play
the cello. You go as fast as possible. You make it snappy.
The war of 1914 precipitated the crisis of language. I
tfould readily say that the war of 1940 has revalorised it.
But it is to be hoped that in taking up our names again,
/ye were taking risks on our own account. After all, a
oof-mender will always be running a great many more.
In a society which insists upon production and restricts
consumption to wfaat is strictly necessary, the work of
iterature is evidently gratuitous. Even if the writer

1. I sometimes wonder whether the Germans, who had at their disposal a
undred means of knowing the names of the members of the National Writers
lommittee, did not spare us. We were pure consumers for them too. Here the
recess is inverted. The diffusion of our newspapers was highly limited. It
'ould have been more inexpedient in regard to the supposed politic of collabora-
ion to arrest Eluard or Mauriac than dangerous to let them whisper in freedom,
'he Gestapo doubtless preferred to concentrate its efforts on the underground
>rces and the members of the Maquis whose acts of real destruction troubled

more than our abstract negativity. Doubtless, they arrested and shot Jacques
ecour. But at the time Decour was not yet very well known.

234

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

strongly stresses the work that he puts into it, even if he
points out, and rightfully, that this work, considered in
itself, involves the same faculties as that of an engineer
or doctor, the fact remains that the created object is not
to be compared with goods. This gratuity, far from griev-
ing us, is our pride, and we know that it is the image of
freedom.

The work of art is gratuitous because it is an absolute
end and because it presents itself to the spectator as a
categorical imperative. In addition, although it neither
can nor wants to be production by itself, it wants to rep-
resent the free consciousness of a productive society, that
is, to reflect production upon the producer in terms of
freedom, as Hesiod did in the past. It is not, to be sure,
a matter of picking up the thread of that boring liter-
ature of work of which Pierre Hamp was the most
solemn and soporific representative. But as this type of
reflection is both a summons and a surpassing, it is
necessary to manifest to the men of this age the prin-
ciples, aims, and inner constitution of their productive
activity, at the same time that we show them their
works and days.

If negativity is one aspect of freedom, constructive-
ness is the other. Now, the paradox of our age is that
constructive freedom has never been so close to becoming
conscious of itself and never has it been so profoundly
alienated. Never has work more powerfully manifested
its productivity, and never have workers been more
swindled out of its products and its significance. Never
has homo faber better understood that he has made his-
tory and never has he felt so powerless before history.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Our job is cut out for us. Insofar as literature is
negativity it will challenge the alienation of work; inso-
far as it is a creation and an act of surpassing, it will
present man as creative action. It will go along with him
in his effort to pass beyond his present alienation toward
a better situation. If it is true that to have, to make, and
to be are the prime categories of human reality, it might
be said that the literature of consumption has limited
itself to the study of the relations which unite being to
having. The sensation is presented as enjoyment, which is
philosophically false, and the one who knows best how
to enjoy himself is the one who exists most. From The
Culture of the Self to The Possession of the World, in-
cluding Earthly Nourishments and Barnabooth's Journal,
to be is to appropriate.

The work of art, an outcome of similar pleasures, it-
self pretends to be enjoyment or promise of enjoyment.
So the circle is completed. We, on the contrary, have
been led by circumstances to bring to light the relation-
ship between being and doing in the perspective of our
historical situation. Is one what one does? What he makes
of himself? In present-day society, where work is alien-
ated? What should one do, what end should he choose
today? And how is it to be done, by what means? What
are the relationships between ends and means in a so-
ciety based on violence?

The works deriving from such preoccupations can not
aim first to please. They irritate and disturb. They of-
fer themselves as tasks to be discharged. They urge the
reader on to quests without conclusions. They present us
with experiences whose outcomes are uncertain. The

236

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

fruits of torments and questions, they can not be enjoy-
ment for the reader, but rather questions and torments.
If our results turn out successful, they will not be diver-
sions, but rather obsessions. They will give not a world
"to see 55 but to change.

On the other hand, this old, used, sore, sniveling world
will lose nothing thereby. Since Schopenhauer it has been
assumed that objects are revealed in their full dignity
when man silences in his heart the wish for power. It is
to the idle consumer that they yield their secrets. It is
permitted to write about them only in moments when
one has nothing to do about them. The fastidious descrip-
tions of the last century were a rejection of utility. One
did not touch the universe; one took it in raw, with the
eyes. The writer, in opposition to bourgeois ideology,
chose to speak to us df things at the privileged moment
when all the concrete relations which united him with
the objects were broken, save the slender thread of his
gaze, and when they gently undid themselves to his eyes,
untied sheaves of exquisite sensations.

It was the age of impressions, impressions of Italy, of
Spain, of the Orient. The man of letters described these
landscapes, which he absorbed consciously, at the in-
definable moment between the end of the taking-in and
the beginning of the digestion, when subjectivity had
come to impregnate the object but before its acids had
begun to eat into it, when fields and woods are still fields
and woods and already a state of soul. A glazed and
polished world inhabited bourgeois books, a world for
sojourns in the country, which tinges us with a decent
gaiety or a well-bred melancholy. We see it from our

237

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

windows; we are not in it. When the novelist peoples it
with peasants, they are in contrast with the vacant
shadow of the mountains and the silvery sheen of the
rivers. While they are hard at work digging their spades
into the earth, we are made to see them dressed up in
their Sunday clothes. These workers, lost in this seventh-
day universe, resemble the academician of Jean Eiffel
whom Provost introduced into one of his caricatures
and who excused himself by saying, "I'm in the wrong
cartoon." Or, perhaps they too have been transformed
into objects into objects and states of soul.

For us, doing reveals being. Each gesture traces out
new forms on the earth. Each technique, each tool, is
a way that opens upon the world; things have as many
aspects as there are ways of using them. We are no longer
with those who want to possess the world, but with those
who want to change it, and it is to the very plan of
changing it that it reveals the secrets of its being. One
knows the hammer best, says Heidegger, when one uses
it to hammer. And the nail, when one drives it into the
wall, and the wall when one drives the nail into it.

Saint-Exupery has opened the way for us. He has
shown that, for the pilot, the airplane is an organ of
perception. 1 A chain of mountains at three hundred
seventy-five miles an hour and in the new perspective of
flight is a tangle of snakes. They settle down, grow dark,
thrust their hard and calcinated heads against the sky,
trying to do damage, to strike. Speed with its astringent
power gathers the folds of the earthly gown and hems
them in. At fourteen thousand feet above, the obscure

1. See particularly Earth of Men.

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

pulls which draw San Antonio toward New York shine
like rails.

After him, after Hemingway, how could we dream of
describing? We must plunge things into action. Their
density of being will be measured for the reader by the
multiplicity of practical relations which they maintain
with the characters. Have the mountain climbed by the
smuggler, the customs-officer, and the guerilla, have it
flown over by the aviator 2 and the mountain will sud-
denly surge from these connected actions and jump out
of your book like a jack-in-the-box. Thus, the world
and man reveal themselves by undertakings. And all the
undertakings we might speak of reduce themselves to a
single one, that of making history. So here we are, led
by the hand to the moment when the literature of exis
must be abandoned to inaugurate that of praxis.

Praxis as action in history and on history; that is, as
a synthesis of historical relativity and moral and meta-
physical absolute, with this hostile and friendly, terrible
and derisive world which it reveals to us. There is our
subject. I do not say that we have chosen these austere
paths. There are surely some among us who are carrying
within them some charming and heart-breaking love story
which will never see the light of day. What can we do
about it? It is not a matter of choosing one's age but of
choosing oneself within it.

The literature of production which is being proclaimed
will not make us forget the literature of consumption, its
antithesis; it should not pretend to surpass it, and maybe
it will never equal it. No one is dreaming of claiming that

2. Like Hemingway, for example in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

239

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

because of it we shall get to the very bottom and realize
the essence of the art of writing. Maybe it will even
disappear soon. The generation which is following us
seems hesitant; many of its novels are about sad and
stolen holidays, like those parties during the occu-
pation when young people danced between two alerts
while drinking cheap wine to the sound of pre-war
phonograph records. In that case, it will be a revolution
that didn't come off. And even if this literature does
manage to establish itself, it will pass like the other, and
the other will return, and perhaps the history of the next
few decades will record the alternating from one to the
other. That will mean that men will have definitely
botched up another Revolution of infinitely greater im-
portance. The fact is that only in a socialist collectivity
would literature, having finally understood its essence
and having made the synthesis of praxis and exis, of
negativity and construction, of doing, having, and being,
deserve the name of total literature. While waiting, let
us cultivate our garden. We have our work cut out for us.
Indeed, to recognize literature as a freedom, to re-
place spending by giving, to renounce the old aristocratic
lie of our elders, and to want to launch, through all our
works, a democratic appeal to the whole of the col-
lectivity is not the whole story. We still have to know who
reads us and whether the present state of affairs does
not relegate our desire of writing for the "concrete uni-
versal" to the rank of Utopias. If our desires could be
realized, the twentieth-century writer would occupy be-
tween the oppressed and those who oppress them an
analogous position to that of eighteenth-century authors

240

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

between the bourgeois and the aristocracy, to that of
Richard Wright between the blacks and the whites, read
by both the oppressed and the oppressor, furnishing the
oppressor with his image, both inner and outer, being
conscious with and for the oppressed of the oppression,
contributing to the formation of a constructive and rev-
olutionary ideology. Unfortunately, these are anachro-
nistic hopes; what was possible in the time of Proudhon
and Marx is so no longer. So let us take up the question
from the beginning, and without any preconceived con-
clusions let us take an inventory of our public.

From this point of view, the situation of the writer
has never been so paradoxical. It seems to be made up
of the most contradictory characteristics. On the asset
side, brilliant appearances, vast possibilities; on the
whole, an enviable way of life. On the debit side, only
this: that literature is dying. Not that talent or good
will is lacking, but it has no longer anything to do in
contemporary society. At the very moment that we are
discovering the importance of praxis, at the moment that
we are beginning to have some notion of what a total
literature might be, our public collapses and disappears.
We no longer know literally for whom to write.

At first glance, to be sure, it would seem as if writers
of the past ought to envy our lot. 1 Malraux once said,

1. But don't let us exaggerate. In gross, the situation of the writer has im-
proved. But, as will be seen, chiefly by extra-literary means (radio, movies,
journalism) which were not available formerly. The one who can't or won't
have recourse to these means must practise a second profession or have a
tough time of it. "It is extremely rare for me to have coffee to drink and
enoUgh cigarettes," writes Julien Blanc ("Grievances of a Writer," Combat,
April 27, 1947). "Tomorrow I won't put any butter on my bread, and the
druggist's price for the phosphorous which I lack is preposterous . . . since

241

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

"We are profiting from the suffering of Baudelaire/ 5 I
don't think that that's quite true, but it is true that Bau-
delaire died without a public and that we, without hav-
ing proven our merit, without even knowing whether
we ever will prove it, have readers all over the world. One
might be tempted to blush at this, but, after all, it is not
our fault; it's all the result of circumstances. The pre-war
autarchies and the war deprived national publics of their
annual contingent of foreign works. Today people are
catching up. They're gobbling up double mouthfuls. On
this point alone there is decompression. The states are
in on it. I have shown elsewhere that in the conquered
or ruined countries literature has recently begun to be
considered as an article for export. This literary market
was expanded and regularized when the collectivities
got busy with it. We find there the usual procedures:
dumping (for example, the American Overseas editions),
protectionism (in Canada, in certain countries of Cen-
tral Europe), international agreements. The countries
flood each other reciprocally with "Digests," that is, as
the name indicates, of literature already digested, of
literary pap. In short, belles-lettres, like the movies, are
in the process of becoming an industrialized art. To be
sure, we benefit: the plays of Cocteau, of Salacrou, and
of Anouilh are being performed everywhere. I could

1943 I have undergone five serious operations. Very shortly I am going to
have a sixth, a very serious one. Being a writer, I have no social security.
I have a wife and child. The state remembers me only to ask for excessive
taxes on my trifling royalties. . . It is going to be necessary for me to
take steps to reduce my hospital expenses. . . And the Society of Men of Let'
ters and the Authors' Fund? The first will back me up; the second, having
given me a gift last month of four thousand francs. . . Let's forget it."

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

cite any number of works which have been translated
into six or seven languages less than three months after
their publication. Yet, all this is brilliant only on the
surface. Perhaps we are read in New York or Tel Aviv,
but the shortage of paper has limited our editions in
Paris, Thus the public has been dispersed more than it
has increased. Perhaps ten thousand people read us in
four or five foreign countries and another ten thousand
in our own. Twenty thousand readers a minor pre-
war success. These worldwide reputations are far less
well established than the national reputations of our
elders. I know, paper is coming back. But at the same
moment, European publishing is entering a crisis; the
volume of sales remains constant.

Even though we might have a certain amount of ce-
lebrity outside of France, there would be no reason for
rejoicing; it would be an ineffectual glory. Nations today
are separated by differences of economic and military
potential more surely than by seas or mountains. An
idea can descend from a country with a high potential
toward a country with a low potential for example,
from America to France it can not rise. To be sure,
there are so many newspapers, so many international con-
tacts, that Americans finally get to hear about the lit-
erary or social theories that are circulating in Europe, but
these doctrines are exhausted in their ascent; virulent
in a country with a weak potential, they are in a languid
state when they reach the summit. We know that intel-
lectuals in the United States gather European ideas into
a bouquet, inhale them for a moment, and then toss them
away because the bouquets wither more quickly there

243

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

than in other climates. As for Russia, she gleans and takes
what she can easily convert into her own substance.
Europe is conquered and ruined; she is no longer master
of her destiny; and that is the reason why her ideas can
no longer make their way. The only concrete circuit for
the exchange of ideas passes through England, France,
the Northern countries, and Italy.

It is true that our reputations are far more widespread
than our books. We make contact with people, without
even wanting to do so, by new means, with new angles
of incidence. Of course, the book is still the heavy in-
fantry which clears and occupies the terrain. But liter-
ature has its airplanes, its Vi's and VYs which go a
great distance, upsetting and harassing, without bring-
ing about the actual decision. First, the newspaper. An
author used to write for ten thousand readers. He is
given the critic's column in a weekly and he has three
hundred thousand even if his articles are worthless. Then
the radio. No Exit, one of my plays, banned in England
by the theatre censors, was broadcast four times by the
B.B.C. On a London stage it would not have found,
even making the improbable assumption that it would
be a success, mom than twenty to thirty thousand spec-
tators. The drama broadcast of B.B.C. automatically pro-
vided me with a half-million. Finally, the movies. Four
million people frequent the French movie houses. If we
recall that at the beginning of the century Paul Souday
reproached Gide for publishing his works in limited edi-
tions, the success of The Pastoral Symphony will enable
us to measure the distance that we have covered.

However, of the columnist's three hundred thousand

244

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

readers, hell be lucky if a few thousand have the
curiosity to buy his works, into which he has put the
best of his talent. The others will learn his name for
having read it a hundred times on the second page of
the magazine like that of the physic which they've seen
a hundred times on the twelfth. The Englishmen who
would have gone to see No Exit in the theatre would
have done so with a knowledge of why they were going,
on the basis of the reviews and mouth to mouth criticism,
and with the intention of judging the work. When my
B.B.C. listeners were turning on their radios they were
unaware of the existence of the play or of me. They
wanted to hear, as usual, the Thursday drama broad-
cast. As soon as it was over, they forgot it, as they did
the preceding ones.

In the movie houses, the public is attracted by the
names of the stars, then by the name of the director,
and last of all by that of the writer. The name of Gide
recently entered certain heads by invasion, but I am sure
that it is curiously married there with the beautiful face
}f Michele Morgan. It is true that the film has caused
i few thousand copies of the work to be sold, but in the
*yes of its new readers the latter appears as a more or
ess faithful commentary on the former. The wider the
public that the author reaches, the less deeply does he
iffect it, the less he recognizes himself in the influence he
las; his thoughts escape him; they become distorted
ind vulgarized. They are received with more indiffer-
ence and scepticism by bored and weary souls who, be-
muse the author can not speak to them in their "native
anguage" still consider literature as a diversion. What

245

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

remains is formulas attached to names. And since our
reputations extend much farther than our books, that is,
than our merits, whether great or small, we need not
see in these passing favors which are granted us the sign
of a first awakening of the concrete universal but quite
simply that of a literary inflation.

That would be nothing; it would be enough, in short,
to be on guard; after all, it depends on us for literature
not to be industrialized. But there is worse; we have
readers but no public. 1 In 1 780 the oppressing class alone
had an ideology and political organizations. The bour-
geoisie had neither party nor political self-consciousness.
The writer worked for it directly by criticizing the old
myths of monarchy and religion, and by giving it a few
elementary notions whose content was chiefly negative,
such as those of liberty, political equality, and habeas cor-
pus. In 1850 the proletariat, in the presence of a conscious
bourgeoisie which was provided with a systematic ideol-
ogy, remained formless and obscure to itself, pervaded by
vain and hopeless anger. The First International had only
scratched its surface. Everything remained to be done.
The writer could have addressed the workers directly.
We have seen that he missed his chance. But at least he
served the interests of the oppressed class unintentionally
and even unknowingly by practising his negativity on
bourgeois values. Thus, in either case, circumstances per-
mitted him to testify for the oppressed before the op-
pressor and to help the oppressed become conscious, of
themselves. The essence of literature found itself in ac-

1. Aside, of course, from Catholic "writers." As for the so-called Communist
"writers" I speak about them later on.

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

cord with the exigencies of the historical situation. But
today everything is reversed. The oppressing class has
lost its ideology; its self -consciousness vacillates; its limits
are no longer clearly definable; it opens up and it calls
the writer to the rescue. The oppressed class, cramped
in a party and tied down by a rigorous ideology, becomes
a closed society. One can no longer communicate with
it without an intermediary. The fate of the bourgeoisie
was tied up with European supremacy and colonialism.
It is losing its colonies at a time when Europe is ceasing
to govern its destiny. It is no longer a matter of little
kings carrying on wars for Rumanian petroleum or the
Bagdad railroad; the next conflict will necessitate an
industrial equipment that the entire Old World is in-
capable of furnishing. Two world powers, neither of
which is bourgeois and neither of which is European, are
disputing the possession of the universe. The triumph of
one means the advent of statism and international bu-
reaucracy; of the other, the coming of abstract capital-
ism. Everybody a civil servant? Everybody an employee?
The bourgeoisie will be lucky if it can keep the illusion
of the sauce with which it will be eaten. It knows today
that it represented a moment in the history of Europe, a
stage in the development of techniques and tools and
that it has never been the measuring rod of the world.
Besides, the feeling it had of its essence and its mission
has been dimmed. It has been shaken, undermined, and
eroded by economic crises with consequent internal fis-
sures, displacements, and landslides. In certain countries
it stands like the facade of a building which has been
gutted; in others, great sections of it have collapsed into

247

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the proletariat. It can no longer be defined by the pos-
session of goods, of which it has less and less each day,
nor by political power, which it shares almost everywhere
with new men who have sprung directly from the pro-
letariat. At present it is the bourgeoisie which has taken
on the amorphous and gelatinous aspect which char-
acterizes oppressed classes before they have become con-
scious of their state. In France we discover that it is
fifty years behind in equipment and in the organization
of heavy industry. Whence, the crisis in our birth-rate,
an undeniable sign of regression. Besides, the black
market and the occupation have caused forty percent of
its wealth to pass into the hands of a new bourgeoisie
which has neither the morals, the principles, nor the
goals of the old one. Ruined, but still oppressive, the
European bourgeoisie barely manages to keep governing,
and with modest means. In Italy, it keeps the workers
in check because it is supported by the coalition of the
Church and misery. Elsewhere, it makes itself indispensa-
ble because it supplies the technical staffs and adminis-
trative personnel. Elsewhere again, it rules by dividing.
And then, above all, the era of national revolutions is
closed. The revolutionary parties do not want to over-
turn this worm-eaten carcass. They even do what they
can to prevent its collapsing. At the first sound of crack-
ing there would be foreign intervention and perhaps
the world-wide conflict for which Russia is not yet ready.
An object of everybody's solicitude, doped by the U.S.A.,
by the Church, and even by the U.S.S.R., at the mercy
of the changing fortune of the diplomatic game, the
bourgeoisie can neither preserve nor lose its power with-

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

out the concurrence of foreign powers. It is the "sick
man" of contemporary Europe. Its agony may last a long
time.

As a result, its ideology is collapsing. It justified prop-
erty by work and also by that slow osmosis which diffuses
into the soul of the possessors the virtues of the things
possessed. The possession of property was, in its eyes, a
merit and the finest self-culture. But, property is be-
coming symbolic and collective. One no longer possesses
things but their signs or the signs of their signs. The
argument of "work-merit" and that of "enjoyment-cul-
ture" have turned flat. Out of hatred of the trusts and
the bad conscience which abstract property induces,
many turned toward fascism. Summoned by their
wishes, it came, replaced the trusts by a system of direc-
torship, then disappeared, and the system remained. The
bourgeois gained nothing. If they still possess, they do so
harshly and joylessly. They considered wealth as an un-
justifiable state of fact; they have lost faith. Neither do
they retain much confidence in that democratic regime
which was their pride and which collapsed at the first
push. But as national socialism in turn collapsed just
when they were about to rally to it, they no longer
believe either in Republic or Dictatorship. Nor in Prog-
ress; it was fine when their class was on the way up;
now that it is declining, they are no longer concerned
with the notion; it would be heart-breaking for them to
think that other men and other classes will ensure it.
Their work brings them into no more direct contact with
actual matter than before, but two wars have made them
discover fatigue, blood and tears, violence, and evil.

249

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

The bombs have not only destroyed their factories but
have caused fissures to appear in their idealism as well.
Utilitarianism was the philosophy of savings; it loses all
meaning when the savings are compromised by inflation
and threats of bankruptcy. To quote Heidegger roughly,
"The world is revealed at the horizon of instruments
which are out of order." When you use a tool, you do
so to produce a certain modification which is itself the
means of bringing about another, and so on. Thus, you
are engaged in a chain of means and ends whose scope
escapes you, and you are too absorbed in the details
of your action to question its final ends. But if the tool
should break, the action is suspended and you see the
whole chain. So with the bourgeois; his instruments are
out of order; he sees the chain and knows the gratuitous-
ness of his ends. As long as he believed in them without
seeing them, and as long as he was working over the
nearest links with his head down, they justified him; now
that they hit him right between the eyes, he discovers
that he is unjustifiable. The whole world is disclosed and
likewise his forlornness in the world. Anguish is born. 1 And
shame too. Even for those who judge it in the name of
its own principles, it is manifest that the bourgeoisie has
been guilty of three betrayals: at Munich, in May '40,
and under the Vichy government. Of course, it corrected
itself; many Vichyites of the first hour were in the re-

1. I admit without difficulty the Marxist description of "existentialist"
anguish as a historical and class phenomenon. Existentialism, in its contem-
porary form, appears with the decomposition of the bourgeoisie, and its origin
is bourgeois. But that this decomposition can disclose certain aspects of the
human condition and make possible certain metaphysical intuitions does not
mean that these intuitions and this disclosure are illusions of the bourgeois
consciousness or mythical representations of the situation.

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

sistance in '42. They realized that they had to fight
against the occupier in the name of bourgeois national-
ism. And it is true that the Communist Party hesitated
more than a year; it is true that the Church hesitated
until the Liberation. But both of them have enough
strength, unity, and discipline to demand of their initiates
that they forget their past faults. The bourgeoisie has
forgotten nothing. It still carries about the wounds in-
flicted upon it by one of its sons, the one it was most
proud of. By condemning Petain to life imprisonment, it
feels that it has put itself behind bars. It might apply
to itself the words of Paul Chack, an officer, a Catholic,
and a bourgeois, who, because he blindly followed the
orders of a Catholic and bourgeois marshal of France,
was accused before a bourgeois tribunal under the gov-
ernment of a Catholic and bourgeois general, and who,
stupefied by this sleight-of-hand, kept mumbling through-
out the trial, "I don't understand. 55 Harassed, without
a future, without guarantees, without justification, the
bourgeoisie, which objectively had become the sick man,
has subjectively entered the phase of the guilty con-
science. Many of its members are bewildered; they shut-
tle between anger and fear, which are two kinds of
flight. The best of them still try to defend, if not their
goods, which in a good many cases have gone up in
smoke, at least the real bourgeois conquests: the uni-
versality of laws, freedom of expression, habeas corpus.
It is they who form our public. Our only public. They
understood, in reading the old books, that literature, by
its nature, is ranged on the side of democratic freedoms.
They turn to it; they beg it to give them reasons for living

251

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

and hoping, a new ideology. Perhaps never since the
eighteenth century has so much been expected of the
writer.

We have nothing to tell them. In spite of themselves,
they belong to an oppressing class. Victims, doubtless, and
innocent, but, still and all, tyrants and guilty. All we can
do is reflect their unhappy conscience in our mirrors, that
is, advance a bit further the decomposition of their prin-
ciples. We have the thankless job of reproaching them for
their faults when they have become maledictions. Our-
selves bourgeois, we have known bourgeois anguish. We
have had that harassed soul. But since the characteristic
of an unhappy conscience is to want to tear itself away
from the state of unhappiness, we cannot remain tran-
quilly in the bosom of our class, and since it is no longer
possible for us to leave it with a flap of our wings by
giving ourselves the appearance of a parasitic aristocracy,
we must be its gravediggers, even if we run the risk of
burying ourselves along with it.

We turn toward the working class which to-day, like
the bourgeoisie in 1 780, might constitute for the writer a
revolutionary public. It is still a virtual public, but it is
singularly present. The worker of 1947 has a social and
professional culture. He reads technical, union, and polit-
ical journals. He has become conscious of himself and
his position in the world and he has much to teach us.
He has lived all the adventures of our time, in Moscow
in 1917, in Budapest, in Munich, in Madrid, in Stalin-
grad, and in the Maquis. At the time that we are discov-
ering in the art of writing freedom in its two aspects of
negativity and creative surpassing, he is trying to free

252

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

himself and, by the same token, to free all men from op-
pression forever. As a member of the oppressed, he may
see the object of his anger reflected by literature in its
aspect of negativity; as a producer and revolutionary, he
is, par excellence, the subject of a literature of praxis. We
share with him the duty of contesting and destroying; he
demands the right to make history at the moment that
we are discovering our historicity. We are not yet familiar
with his language; neither is he with ours; but we already
know the means of reaching him. We also know that in
Russia he engages in discussion with the writer himself
and that a new relationship between the public and the
writer has appeared there which is neither a passive and
female waiting nor the specialized criticism of the intel-
lectual. I do not believe in the "Mission" of the prole-
tariat, nor that it is endowed with a state of grace; it is
made up of men, just and unjust, who can make mistakes
and who are often mystified. But it must be said without
hesitation that the fate of literature is bound up with that
of the working class.

Unhappily, these men, to whom we must speak, are
separated from us by an iron curtain in our own country;
they will not hear a word that we shall say to them. The
majority of the proletariat, straight- jacketed by a single
party, encircled by a propaganda which isolates it, forms
a closed society without doors or windows. There is only
one way of access, a very narrow one, the Communist
Party. Is it desirable for the writer to engage himself in it?
If he does it out of conviction as a citizen and out of dis-
gust with literature, very well, he has chosen. But can
he become a communist and remain a writer?

253

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

The C.P. aligns its politics with that of Soviet Rus-
sia because this is the only country in which one finds the
rough draught of a socialist organization. But if it is true
that Russia began the social revolution, it is also true that
she has not ended it. The retardation of her industry, her
shortage of supervisory personnel, and the masses' lack
of culture have prevented her from realizing socialism by
herself and even from imposing it upon other countries by
the contagion of her example. If the revolutionary move-
ment which started from Moscow could have spread to
other nations, it would have continued to evolve in Russia
itself in proportion to the ground it gained outside. Con-
tained within the Soviet frontiers, it congealed into a de-
fensive and conservative nationalism because it had to
save, at any cost, the results it had achieved. At the
very moment when it was becoming the Mecca of the
working classes, Russia saw that it was impossible, on
one hand, for her to assume her historical mission and, on
the other, to deny it. She was forced to withdraw into
herself, to apply herself to creating supervisors, to catch
up on her equipment, and to perpetuate herself by an
authoritarian regime in the form of a revolution at
a standstill. As the European parties which derived from
her, and which were preparing for the coming of the pro-
letariat, were nowhere strong enough to take the offensive,
she had to use them as the advance bastions of her de-
fense. But as they could serve her, in regard to the masses,
only by fostering revolutionary politics, and as she has
never lost hope of becoming the leader of the European
proletariat if circumstances should some day show them-
selves more favorable, she has left them their red flag and

254

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

their faith. Thus the forces of the World Revolution have
been diverted to the maintenance of a revolution in a state
of hibernation. Still it must be acknowledged that, insofar
as it has honestly believed in the possibility, even though
remote, of seizing power by insurrection, and insofar as
it has made it its business to weaken the bourgeoisie
and to bore from within the Socialist Party, the C.P. has
practiced a negative criticism of capitalistic institutions
and regimes which has maintained the outer appearances
of freedom. Before 1939 it made use of everything: pam-
phlets, satires, bitter novels, Surrealistic violence, over-
whelming evidence regarding our colonial methods. Since
1944 things have become aggravated; a collapsing Europe
has simplified the situation. Two powers remain standing,
the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. ; each one frightens the other.
From fear, as we know, comes anger, and from anger,
blows.

Now, the U.S.S.R. is the less strong. Hardly out of a
war which she had feared for twenty years, she still has
to temporize, to catch up in the armament race, to re-
tighten the dictatorship internally, and, externally, to as-
sure herself of allies, vassals, and positions.

The revolutionary tactic is changed into diplomacy. It
must have Europe on its side. Thus, it must appease the
bourgeoisie, lull it to sleep with fables, and at any cost
keep it from throwing itself into the Anglo-Saxon camp
out of fright. The time has quite passed when L > Humanit&
could write: "Every bourgeois who meets a workman
ought to be scared. 53 Never have the Communists been so
powerful in Europe, and yet never have the chances of a
revolution been slighter. If the party should somewhere

255

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

consider the possibility of seizing power, this attempt
would be nipped in the bud. The Anglo-Saxons have
at their disposal a hundred ways of annihilating it,
even without having recourse to arms, and for that mat-
ter the Soviets would not look upon it very favorably. If,
by chance, the insurrection succeeded, it would simply
vegetate without spreading. If by some miracle it finally
became contagious, it would risk being the occasion of
a third world war. Thus, it is no longer for the coming of
the proletariat that the Communists are preparing in their
respective nations, but for war, plain and simple war. If
victorious, the U.S.S.R. will spread its regime to Europe;
the nations will fall like ripe fruit; if beaten, it's all up
with her and the Communists parties. To reassure the
bourgeoisie without losing the confidence of the masses, to
permit it to govern while appearing to keep up the offen-
sive, and to occupy positions of command without letting
itself be compromised that's the politics of the C.P. Be-
tween 1939 and 1940 we were the witnesses and victims
of the decay of a war; today we are present at the decay-
ing of a revolutionary situation.

If it should be asked whether the writer, in order to
reach the masses, should offer his services to the Com-
munist Party, I answer no. The politics of Stalinist Com-
munism is incompatible in France with the honest prac-
tice of the literary craft. A party which is planning rev-
olution should have nothing to lose. For the C.P. there
is something to lose and something to handle circumspec-
tly. As its immediate goal can no longer be the establish-
ment of a dictatorship of the proletariat by force, but ra-
ther that of safeguarding a Russia which is in danger, it

256

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

now presents an ambiguous appearance. Progressive and
revolutionary in its doctrine and in its avowed ends, it has
become conservative in its means. Even before it has
seized power, it has adopted the turn of mind, the rea-
soning, and the artifices of those who have long since at-
tained it, those who feel that it is escaping them and who
want to maintain themselves. There is something in com-
mon, and it is not talent, between Joseph de Maistre and
M. Garaudy. And generally it is enough to skim through
a piece of Communist writing to pick out at random a
hundred conservative procedures: persuasion by repeti-
tion, by intimidation, by veiled threats, by forceful and
scornful assertion, by cryptic allusions to demonstra-
tions that are not forthcoming, by exhibiting so complete
and superb a conviction that, from the very start, it places
itself above all debate, casts its spell, and ends by becom-
ing contagious; the opponent is never answered; he is
discredited; he belongs to the police, to the Intelligence
Service; he's a fascist. As for proofs, they are never given,
because they are terrible and implicate too many people.
If you insist upon knowing them, you are told to stop
right there and to take someone's word for the accusa-
tion. "Don't force us to bring them out; you'll be sorry
if you do". In short, the Communist intellectual adopts
the attitude of the staff which condemned Dreyfuss on
secret evidence. He also reverts, to be sure, to the Ma-
nichaeism of the reactionaries, though he divides the
world according to other principles. For the Stalinist a
Trotskyist is an incarnation of evil, like the Jew for Maur-
ras. Everything that comes from him is necessarily bad.
On the other hand, the possession of certain titles serves

257

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

as a seal of approval. Compare this sentence of Joseph
de Maistre, "The married woman is necessarily chaste/ 3
with this one of a correspondent of Action, "The com-
munist is the permanent hero of our time. 35 That there
are heroes in the Communist Party let me be the first
to admit it. So what? Has no married woman ever been
weak? No, since she is married before God. And is it
enough to enter the Party to become a hero? Yes, since the
C.P. is the party of heroes. But what if someone cited
the name of a Communist who sometimes was not all he
should be? It 3 s because he wasn 3 t a real Communist.

In the nineteenth century one had to give all sorts of
guaranties and lead an exemplary life in order to cleanse
oneself in the eyes of the bourgeois of the sin of writing,
for literature is, in essence, heresy. The situation has not
changed except that it is now the Communists, that is,
the qualified representatives of the proletariat, who as a
matter of principle regard the writer as suspect. Even
though he may be irreproachable in his morals, a Com-
munist intellectual bears within him this original defect :
that he entered the party freely; he was led to this deci-
sion by a thoughtful reading of Capital, a critical exami-
nation of the historical situation, an acute sense of justice
and generosity, and a taste for solidarity; all this is proof
of an independence which doesn't smell so very good.
He entered the party by free choice; therefore, he can
leave it. 4 He entered because he had criticized the politics
of his class of origin; therefore, he will be able to criticize
that of the representatives of his class of adoption. But in

4. The worker has joined the C.P. under the pressure of circumstances. He
is less suspect because his possible choices are more limited.

258

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

the very action by which he inaugurates a new life, there
is a malediction which will weigh upon him all through
this life. From the moment of ordination there begins
for him a long trial, similar to the one Kafka has described
for us, in which the judges are unknown and the dossiers
secret, where the only definitive sentences are condemna-
tions. It is not up to his invisible accusers to give proof
of his crime, as is customary in justice; it is for him to
prove his innocence. As everything he writes can be held
against him and as he knows it, each of his works presents
the ambiguous character of being both a public appeal in
the name of the C.P. and a secret plea for his own cause.
Everything that, from the outside, for the readers, seems
a chain of peremptory assertions, appears within the
Party, in the eyes of the judges, as a humble and clumsy
attempt at self -justification. When to us he appears most
brilliant and most effective, he is perhaps then most
guilty. Sometimes it seems to us and perhaps he too be-
lieves it that he has been raised into the hierarchy of
the Party and that he has become its spokesman, but
he is being tested or tricked; the levels are faked; when
he thinks he's high up, he's far down. You can read his
writings a hundred times but you'll never be able to de^
cide as to their real importance. When Nizan, who was in
charge of foreign politics for Ce soir, was in all honesty
trying his utmost to prove that our only chance for salva-
tion lay in a Franco-Russian pact, his secret judges, who
let him talk on, already knew about Ribbentrop's con-
versations with Molotov. If he thinks that he can get out
of it by a corpselike obedience, he is mistaken. He is ex-
pected to have wit, pungency, lucidity, and inventiveness.

259

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

But at the same time that these are required of him, he is
penalized for these virtues, for they are, in themselves,
tendencies toward crime. How is he to practice the critical
spirit? The flaw is in him like the worm in a piece of
fruit. He can please neither his readers, his judges, nor
himself. In the eyes of everyone and even of himself he is
only a guilty subjectivity which deforms Knowledge by
reflecting it in his troubled waters. This deformation can
be useful; as his readers make no distinction between what
comes from the author and what from the "historical
process," it is always possible to disclaim him. It is taken
for granted that he dirties his hands in his job, and as
his mission is to express C.P. politics from day to day, his
articles still remain when the line has long since changed,
and these are what the opponents of Stalinism refer to
when they want to show its contradictions or versatility.
Thus, the writer is not only presumed guilty in advance;
he is charged with all past faults, since his name remains
attached to the errors of the Party, and he is the scapegoat
of all the political purges.

Nevertheless, it is not impossible that he may hold out
for a long time if he learns to keep his qualities in leash
when they run the risk of pulling him too far. Yet he
must not use cynicism. Cynicism is as serious a vice as good
will. Let him know how to keep his eyes shut; let him see
what need not be seen, and let him forget sufficiently
what he has seen in order never to write about it, yet let
him remember it sufficiently so that in the future he may
avoid looking at it; let him carry his criticism far enough
to determine the point where it should be brought to a
halt, that is, let him go beyond this point in order to be

260

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

able in the future to avoid the temptation of going beyond
it, but let him know how to detach himself from this pro-
spective criticism, to put it in parentheses, and to regard
it as null and void; in short, let him at all times be aware
that the mind is finite, bounded everywhere by magic
frontiers, by mists, like the primitives who can count up
to twenty and are mysteriously denied the power of go-
ing any further. This artificial fog which he must be
always ready to spread between himself and risky evid-
ence, we shall call, very simply, dishonesty. But we're not
through yet : let him avoid speaking too often about dog-
mas; it's not good to show them in broad daylight; the
works of Marx, like the Bible of the Catholics, are dan-
gerous to the one who approaches them without a director
of conscience; there is one in each cell; if doubts or
scruples arise it is to him that one must go and talk. Nor
should you put too many Communists in your novels or on
the stage; if they have faults, they run the risk of displeas-
ing; if too perfect, they bore. Stalinist politics has no de-
sire to find its image in literature because it knows that a
portrait is already a contestation. One can get out of it by
painting the "permanent hero 55 en profil perdu by mak-
ing him appear at the end of the story to draw conclu-
sions, or by everywhere suggesting his presence but with-
out showing it, as Daudet with the Arlesienne. As far as
possible, avoid bringing up the revolution; that's rather
dated. The European proletariat no more governs its
destiny than does the bourgeoisie; history is written else-
where. It must be slowly weaned of its old dreams, and the
perspective of insurrection must be gently replaced by
that of war. If the writer conforms to all these prescrip-

261

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

tions, he will not be in greater favor on that account. He's
a useless mouth; he doesn't work with his hands. He
knows it; he suffers from an inferiority complex; he is
almost ashamed of his craft and puts as much zeal into
bowing before the workers as Jules Lamaitre put into
bowing before the generals around 1900.

During this period, the Marxist doctrine which is
quite intact has been withering away; for want of in-
ternal controversy, it has been degraded to a stupid de-
terminism. Marx, Lenin, and Engels said any number of
times that explanation by causes had to yield to the dia-
lectical process. But the dialectic does not admit of being
put into the formulas of a catechism. An elementary
scientism is being spread. History is accounted for by
juxtapositions of causal and linear series. Shortly before
the war, Politzer, the last of the great minds of French
Communism, was forced to teach that "the brain secretes
thought 55 as an endocrine gland secretes hormones; when
the Communist intellectual today wants to interpret his-
tory or human behavior, he borrows from bourgeois ideol-
ogy a deterministic psychology based on mechanism and
the law of interest.

But there is worse. The conservation of the C.P. is to-
day accompanied by an opportunism which contradicts
it. It is not only a matter of safeguarding the U.S.S.R.,
but it is also necessary to deal tactfully with the bour-
geoisie. Thus, they talk its language: family, country,
religion, morality. And as they have not thereby given
up the idea of weakening it, they try to fight it on its own
ground by improving upon its principles. The result of
this tactic is to superimpose two contradictory conserv-

262

SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

atisms, materialist scholasticism and Christian moralism.
The truth is that once you abandon all logic, it is not so
difficult to pass from one to the other because both sup-
pose the same sentimental attitude; it is a matter of hold-
ing fast to positions which are threatened, of refusing to
discuss, and of masking fear behind anger. But the point
is that the intellectual, by definition, must also use logic.
Therefore, he is asked to cover up the contradictions by
sleight-of-hand. He must do his best to reconcile the irre-
concilable, to unite by force ideas which repel each other,
and to cover up the soldering by glittering layers of fine
style to say nothing of the task which has fallen to him
only recently, that is, to steal the history of France from
the bourgeoisie, to annex the great Ferre, little Bara,
Saint Vincent de Paul, and Descartes. Poor Communist
intellectuals. They have fled the ideology of their class of
origin only to find it again in the class they have chosen.
Work, family, country no more laughing at it, they've
got to sing it. I imagine that they must often rather want
to let loose, but they are chained. They are allowed to
roar at phantoms or against some writers who have re-
mained free and who represent nothing.

They'll start naming illustrious writers. To be sure, I
recognize the fact that they had talent. Is it an accident
if they no longer have any? I have shown above that the
work of art, which is an absolute end, is opposed in es-
sence to bourgeois utilitarianism. Do they think that it
can accommodate itself to Communist utilitarianism? In
a genuinely revolutionary party it would find the propi-
tious climate for its blossoming because the freedom of
man and the coming of the classless society are likewise

263

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

absolute goals, unconditioned exigencies which literature
can reflect in its own exigency. But the C.P. today has
entered the infernal circle of means. It must take and keep
key positions, that is, means of acquiring means. When
ends withdraw, when means are swarming like gnats as
far as the eye can see, the work of art in turn becomes a
means. It enters the chain. Its ends and its principles be-
come external to it. It is governed from the outside. It
takes man by the belly or the short hairs. The writer main-
tains the appearance of talent, that is, the art of finding
words which gleam, but something is dead within. Liter-
ature has changed into propaganda. 5 Yet it is someone
like M. Garaudy, a Communist and a propagandist, who
accuses me of being a gravedigger. I could return the in-
sult, but I prefer to plead guilty; if I could do so, I would
bury literature with my own hands rather than make it
serve ends which utilize it. But why the excitement?
Gravediggers are honest people, certainly unionized, per-
haps Communists. Fd rather be a gravedigger than a
lackey.

Since we are still free, we won't join the C.P. watch-
dogs. The fact that we have talent does not depend upon
us, but as we have chosen the profession of writing, each
of us is responsible for literature, and whether or not it
becomes alienated does depend upon us. It is sometimes
claimed that our books reflect the hesitations of the petty
bourgeoisie which decides for neither the proletariat nor
for capitalism. That's false; we've made up our minds.
We are then told that our choice is ineffectual and ab-

5. In Communist literature in France, I find only one genuine writer. Nor
is it accidental that he writes about mimosa and beach pebbles.

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stract, that it is an intellectual game if it is not accom-
panied by our adhesion to a revolutionary party. It is
true that today in France one can hardly reach the work-
ing classes if not through the Party. But only loose think-
ing can identify their cause with the C.P.'s. Even if, as
citizens, we can in strictly specific circumstances support
its politics with our votes, that does not mean that we
should serve it with our pens. If the two alternatives are
really the bourgeoisie and the C.P., then the choice is im-
possible. For we do not have the right to write for the op-
pressing class alone, nor to join forces with a party which
asks us to work dishonestly and with a bad conscience.
Insofar as the Communist Party channelizes, almost in
spite of itself, the aspirations of an entire oppressed class
which irresistibly leads it to demand, for fear of being
"outflanked on the left," such measures as peace with the
Viet Nam or the increase of salaries which its whole
political line is inclined to avoid we are with this party
against the bourgeoisie; insofar as certain well-intent-
ioned bourgeois circles recognize that spirituality must be
simultaneously a free negativity and a free construction,
we are with these bourgeois against the G.P. Insofar as a
scurvy, opportunistic, conservative, and deterministic
ideology is in contradiction with the very essence of lit-
erature we are against both the C.P. and the bourgeoisie.
That means clearly that we are writing against everybody,
that we have readers but no public. Bourgeois who have
broken with our class but who have remained bourgeois
in our morals, separated from the proletariat by the Com-
munist screen, we remain up in the air; our good will
serves no one, not even us; we are in the age of the un-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

discoverable public. Worse still, we are writing against
the current.

The authors of the eighteenth century helped make
history because the historical perspective of the moment
was revolution and because a writer can and ought to
align himself on the side of revolution if it is proven that
there is no other means of bringing an end to oppression.
But the writer today can in no case approve of a war, be-
cause the social structure of war is dictatorship, because
its results are always a matter of chance, and because,
whatever happens, its costs are infinitely greater than the
gains, and finally because war alienates literature by mak-
ing it serve the propagandistic hullabaloo.

Since our historical perspective is war, since we are
asked to choose between the Anglo-Saxon and the Soviet
blocs, and since we refuse to prepare for war with either
one or the other, we have fallen outside of history and are
speaking in the desert. We are not even left with the illu-
sion of winning our case by means of an appeal; there will
be no appeal, and we know that the posthumous fate of
our works will depend neither upon our talents nor our ef-
forts, but upon the results of future conflicts. In the event
of a Soviet victory, we will be passed over in silence until
we die a second time; in the event of an American victory,
the best of us will be put into the jars of literary history
and won't be taken out again.

A clear-sighted view of the darkest possible situation
is in itself already an optimistic act. It implies, in effect,
that the situation can be thought about, that is, that we
are not lost in a dark forest and that, on the contrary, we
can break away from it, at least in spirit, that we can

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examine it and thus already go beyond it and take up our
resolutions in the face of it, even if these resolutions are
hopeless. Our engagement must begin the moment we are
repulsed and excommunicated by the Churches, when the
art of writing, wedged in between different propagandas,
seems to have lost its characteristic effectiveness. It is not
a question of adding to the exigencies of literature, but
simply of serving them all together, even without hope.

i . First, let us list our virtual readers, that is, the social
categories which do not read us, but which might. I do
not think that we have made much headway among teach-
ers, which is a pity. They have already served as inter-
mediaries between literature and the masses. 1 By now,
most of them have already chosen. They dispense the
Christian or the Stalinist ideology to their pupils, accord-
ing to the side they have taken. However, there are still
some who are hesitating. These are the ones who must be
reached. A great deal has been written about the petty
bourgeoisie, distrustful and always mystified, so ready, in
its bewilderment, to follow fascist agitators. I do not
think that much has been written for it 2 except propa-
ganda tracts. Yet it is accessible through certain of its ele-
ments. Finally, more remote, difficult to distinguish, and
still more difficult to touch are those popular factions
which have not joined up with communism or which de-
tach themselves from it and risk falling into resigned in-
difference or formless discontent. Outside of that, nothing.
The peasants hardly read though slightly more than

1. They have caused Hugo to be read. More recently they have spread the
work of Giono in certain areas.

2. I except the abortive attempt of Prevost and his contemporaries. I have
spoken of them above.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

they did in 1914. The working class is locked up. Such are
the data of the problem; they are not encouraging, but we
must adapt ourselves to them.

2. How shall we incorporate some of our potential
readers into our actual public? Books are inert. They
act upon those who open them, but they can not open
by themselves. There can be no question of popularizing;
we would be literary morons, and in order to keep lit-
erature from falling into the pitfalls of propaganda we
would be throwing it right in ourselves. So we must
have recourse to new means. They already exist; the
Americans have already adorned them with the name
of "mass media; 55 these are the real resources at our
disposal for conquering the virtual public the news-
paper, the radio, and the movies. Naturally, we have
to squelch our scruples. To be sure, the book is the
noblest, the most ancient of forms; to be sure, we will
always have to return to it. But there is a literary art of
radio, film, editorial, and reporting. There is no need to
popularize. The film, by its very nature, speaks to crowds;
it speaks to them about crowds and about their destiny.
The radio surprises people at the table or in bed, at the
moment when they are most defenseless, in the almost
organic abandon "of solitude. At the present time, it
makes use of its opportunity in order to fool them, but
it is also the moment when one might better appeal to
their good faith; they have not yet put on or have laid
aside the personality with which they face the world.
We've got one foot inside the door. We must learn to
speak in images, to transpose the ideas of our books into
these new languages,

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It is by no means a matter of letting our works be
adapted for the screen or the broadcasts of the French
Radio. We must write directly for the movies and the air-
waves. The difficulties which I have mentioned above
arise from the fact that radio and movies are machines.
Since considerable capital is at stake, it is inevitable that
they are today in the hands of the state or of conservative
corporations. They apply to the writer under a sort of
misapprehension; he believes that they are asking him
for his work, which they are not concerned with, whereas
all they want of him is his signature, which pays. And
since in this respect he is so lacking in practical sense
that, in general, they can't persuade him to sell one with-
out the other, at least they try to get him to please and
to assure the stockholders of their profits or to be per-
suasive and serve the politics of the state. In both
cases, they demonstrate to him statistically that bad pro-
ductions have more success than good ones, and when
they put him wise to the bad taste of the public, he is re-
quested to be so good as to submit to it. When the work
is finished, in order to be sure that it's bad enough they
hand it over to mediocrities who cut out what's beyond
them.

But this is exactly the point that we have to fight
about. It is improper for us to stoop in order to please ; on
the contrary, our job is to reveal to the public its own
needs and, little by little, to form it so that it needs to
read. We must appear to be giving in and yet must make
ourselves indispensable and consolidate our positions, if
possible, by facile successes; then, we must take advan-
tage of the disorder in the governmental services and the

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

incompetence of certain producers to turn these arms
against them. Then the writer will launch out into the
unknown; he will speak in the dark to people he does not
know, to whom no one has ever spoken except to lie.
He will lend his voice to their anger and their worries.
Through him, men whom no mirror has ever reflected,
who have learned to smile and weep like blind men,
without seeing themselves, will suddenly find themselves
before their image. Who could dare claim that literature
will lose thereby? I think that on the contrary it will
gain. The whole numbers and fractions which formerly
were the whole of arithmetic today represent only a small
sector of the science of numbers. The same with liter-
ature: "total literature," if ever it sees the day, will have
its algebra, its irrational and imaginary numbers. Let it
not be said that these industries have nothing to do with
art. After all, printing is also an industry, and the authors
of former times conquered it for us. I do not think that
we shall ever have the full use of the "mass media" but it
would be a fine thing to begin conquering it for our suc-
cessors. In any case, what is certain is that if we do not
make use of it, we must resign ourselves to be forever
writing for nobody but the bourgeois.

3. Bourgeois, intellectuals, teachers, non-communist
workers; granting that we touch all these disparate ele-
ments, how are we going to make a public out of them,
that is, an organic unity of readers, listeners, and spec-
tators?

Let us bear in mind that the man who reads strips
himself in some way of his empirical personality and es-
capes from his resentments, his fears, and his lusts in

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order to put himself at the peak of his freedom. This free-
dom takes the literary work and, through it, mankind,
for absolute ends. It sets itself up as an unconditioned
exigence in relationship to itself, to the author, and to
possible readers. It can therefore be identified with
Kantian good will which, in every circumstance, treats
man as an end and not as a means. Thus, by his
very exigence, the reader attains that chorus of good
wills which Kant has called the City of Ends, which
thousands of readers all over the world who do not know
each other are, at every moment, helping to maintain.
But in order for this ideal chorus to become a concrete
society, it must satisfy two conditions: first, that readers
replace this theoretical acquaintance with each other, in-
sofar as they are all particular examples of mankind, by
an intuition or, at the very least, by a presentiment of
their physical presence in the midst of this world; second,
that, instead of remaining solitary and uttering appeals
in the void, which, in regard to the human condition in
general, affect no one, these abstract good wills establish
real relations among themselves when actual events take
place, or, in other terms, that these non-temporal good
wills historicize themselves while preserving their purity,
and that they transform their exigences into material and
timely demands. Lacking the wherewithal, the city of
ends lasts for each of us only while we are reading; on
passing from the imaginary life to real life we forget this
abstract, implicit community which rests on nothing.
Whence, there arise what I might call the two essential
mystifications of reading.

When a young communist while reading Aurelien,

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

when a Christian student, while reading The Hostage,
have a moment of aesthetic joy, their feeling envelops a
universal exigence; the city of ends surrounds them with
its phantom walls. But during this time the works are
supported by a concrete collectivity in one case, the
Communist Party, in the other, the community of the
faithful which sanctions them and which manifests its
presence between the lines: the priest has spoken of it
from the pulpit, UHumanite has recommended it. The
student never feels alone when he reads. The book dons
a sacred character. It is an accessory of the cult. Read-
ing becomes a rite, more precisely, a communion. On the
other hand if a Nathanael should open Les Nourritures
Terrestres, as soon as he gets into the swing of the book
he launches the same impotent appeal to the good will of
men. The city of ends, magically evoked, does not refuse
to appear. Yet, his enthusiasm remains essentially solitary.
The reading in this case is disjunctive; he is turned
against his family, against the society about him; he is
cut off from the past and the future to be reduced to his
naked presence in the moment; he is taught to descend
within himself in order to recognize and take stock of his
most particular desires. Our Nathanael pays no heed to
the possibility that somewhere else in the world, wherever
it may be, there may be another Nathanael plunged in
the same reading and the same transports. The message
is addressed only to him. When all has been said and
done, he is invited to reject the book, to break the pact of
mutual exigences which unite him to the author; he has
found nothing but himself, himself as a separate en-
tity. As Durkheim might have put it, the solidarity of

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Claudel's readers is organic and that of Gide's me-
chanical.

In both cases, literature runs very serious risks. When
the book is sacred, it does not draw its religious virtue
from its intentions or its beauty, but rather receives it
from without, like a seal, and as the essential moment
of the reading in this case is the communion, that is,
the symbolic integration into the community, the written
work passes to the inessential, it really becomes an ac-
cessory of the ceremony. The example of Nizan shows
this rather clearly: as a communist, he was read with
fervor by the communists; now that he is an apostate,
and dead, it would not occur to any Stalinist to pick up
his books again; to these biased eyes they now offer noth-
ing but the image of treason. But as in 1939 the reader
of The Trojan Horse and The Conspiracy addressed an
unconditioned universal appeal for the union of all free
men, as, on the other hand, the sacred character of these
works was, on the contrary, conditional and temporary
and implied the possibility, in the event of the excom-
munication of their author, of rejecting them like sacrifi-
cial offerings that had been defiled, or simply of for-
getting them if the C.P. changed its line, these two con-
tradictory implications destroyed the very meaning of the
reading. 1 There's nothing surprising in that, since we
have seen the communist writer himself ruin the very
meaning of writing; the circle is completed.

1. This contradiction is met with everywhere, particularly in communist
friendship. Nizan had many friends. Where are they? Those he was most
fond of belonged to the C.P. These are the ones who revile him today. The
only ones who remain faithful are not in the Party. The reason is that the
Stalinist community with its excommunicative power is present in love and
friendship which are person to person relationships.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Must we therefore be satisfied with being read in
secret, almost by stealth? Must the work of art mature
like a fine, ripe vice in the depths of solitary souls? Here
again I think that I discern a contradiction: we have
discovered in the work of art the presence of all man-
kind; reading is a commerce of the reader with the
author and with other readers; how can it be, at the same
time, an invitation to segregation?

We do not want our public, however numerous it
may be, to be reduced to the juxtaposition of individual
readers nor to have its unity conferred upon it by the
transcendent action of a Party or a Church, Reading
should not be mystical communion any moi;e than it
should be masturbation, but rather a companionship.
On the other hand we recognize that the purely formal
recourse to abstract good wills leaves each one in his
original isolation. However, that is the point from which
we must start; if one loses this conducting wire, he is
suddenly lost in the wilds of propaganda or in the ego-
tistical pleasures of a style which is a matter of "purely
personal taste. 35 It is therefore up to us to convert the
city of ends into a concrete and open society and this
by the very content of our works.

If the city of ends remains a feeble abstraction, it is
because it is not realizable without an objective modifica-
tion of the historical situation, Kant, I believe, saw this
very well, but sometimes he counted on a purely sub-
jective transformation of the moral subject and at other
times he despaired of ever meeting a good will on this
earth. In fact, the contemplation of beauty might well
arouse in us the purely formal intention of treating men

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as ends, but this intention would reveal itself to be utterly
futile in practice since the fundamental structures of our
society are still oppressive. Such is the present paradox
of ethics; if I am absorbed in treating a few chosen per-
sons as absolute ends, for example, my wife, my son, my
friends, the needy person I happen to come across, if
I am bent upon fulfilling all my duties toward them,
I shall spend my life doing so; I shall be led to pass over
in silence the injustices of the age, the class struggle,
colonialism, Anti-Semitism, etc., and, finally, to take ad-
vantage of oppression in order to do good. Moreover, the
former will be found in person to person relationships and,
more subtly, in my very intentions. The good that I try to
do will be vitiated at the roots. It will be turned into
radical evil. But, vice versa, if I throw myself into the
revolutionary enterprise I risk having no more leisure for
personal relations worse still, of being led by the logic
of the action into treating most men, and even my friends,
as means. But if we start with the moral exigence which
the aesthetic feeling envelops without meaning to do so,
we are starting on the right foot. We must historicize
the reader's good will, that is, by the formal agency of
our work, we must, if possible, provoke his intention of
treating men, in every case, as an absolute end and, by
the subject of our writing, direct his intention upon his
neighbors, that is, upon the oppressed of the world. But
we shall have accomplished nothing if, in addition, we
do not show him and in the very warp and weft of the
work that it is quite impossible to treat concrete men
as ends in contemporary society. Thus, he will be led by
the hand until he is made to see that, in effect, what he

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

wants is to eliminate the exploitation of man by man and
that the city of ends which, with one stroke, he has set
up in the aesthetic intuition is only an ideal which we
shall approach only at the end of a long historical evolu-
tion. In other words, we must transform his formal good
will into a concrete and material will to change this world
by specific means in order to help the coming of the con-
crete society of ends. For good will is not possible in this
age, or rather it is and can be only the intention of mak-
ing good will possible. Whence, a particular tension
which must manifest itself in our works and which re-
motely recalls the one I mentioned in regard to Richard
Wright. For, a whole section of the public which we wish
to win over still consumes its good will in person to person
relationships, and another whole section, because it be-
longs to the oppressed classes, has given itself the job of
obtaining, by all possible means, the material improve-
ment of its lot. Thus, we must at the same time teach
one group that the reign of ends cannot be realized with-
out revolution and the other group that revolution is
conceivable only if it prepares the reign of ends. It is
this perpetual tension if we can keep it up which
will realize the -unity of our public. In short, we must
militate, in our writings, in favor of the freedom of the
person and the socialist revolution. It has often been
claimed that they are not reconcilable. It is our job to
show tirelessly that they imply each other.

We were born into the bourgeoisie, and this class has
taught us the value of its conquests: political freedom,
habeas corpus, etc. We remain bourgeois by our culture,
our way of life, and our present public. But at the same

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time the historical situation drives us to join the prole-
tariat in order to construct a classless society. No doubt
that for the time being the latter is not very much con-
cerned with freedom of thought; they've got other fish
to fry. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, pretends not
even to understand what the words "material freedom"
mean. Thus, each class can, at least in this regard, pre-
serve a good conscience, since it is unaware of one of the
terms of the antinomy.

But we others, though we have nothing to mediate at
present, are none the less in the position of mediators.
Pulled from both sides, we are condemned to suffer this
double exigence as a Passion. It is our personal problem
as well as the drama of our age. It will, of course, be
said that this antinomy which tortures us is merely due to
our still dragging around the remains of bourgeois ideol-
ogy which we have not been able to shake off; on the
other hand, it will be said that we have a case of revolu-
tionary snobbism and that we want to make literature
serve ends for which it is not designed. That would not
be too bad, but these voices find responsive echoes in
some of us who have unhappy consciences. Therefore, it
would be well for us to impress this truth upon our
minds: it is, perhaps, tempting to abandon formal liber-
ties in order to deny more completely our bourgeois
origins, but that would be enough to discredit funda-
mentally the project of writing. It might be more simple
for us to disinterest ourselves in material demands in
order to produce "pure literature 55 with a serene con-
science, but we would thereby be giving up the idea of
choosing our readers outside of the oppressing class.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

Thus, opposition must also be overcome for ourselves
and within ourselves. Let us first persuade ourselves that
it can be overcome: literature in itself proves this, since
it is the work of a total freedom addressing plenary
freedoms and thus in its own way, manifests the totality
of the human condition as a free product of a creative
activity. And if, on the other hand, a full solution is be-
yond the powers of most of us, it is our duty to over-
come the opposition in a thousand detailed syntheses.
Every day we must take sides: in our life as a writer, in
our articles, in our books. Let it always be by preserving
as our guiding principle the rights of total freedom as an
effective synthesis of formal and material freedoms. Let
this freedom manifest itself in our novels, our essays,
and our plays. And if our characters do not yet enjoy
it, if they live in our time, let us at least be able to show
what it costs them not to have it. It is not enough to de-
nounce abuses and injustices in a fine style, nor to make
a brilliant and negative psychological study of the bour-
geoisie, nor even to let our pens serve social parties in
order to save literature. We must take up a position in
our literature, because literature is in essence a taking of
position. We must, in all domains, both reject solutions
which are not rigorously inspired by socialist principles
and, at the same time, stand off from all doctrines and
movements which consider socialism as the absolute end.
In our eyes it should not represent the final end, but
rather the end of the beginning, or, if one prefers, the
last means before the end which is to put the human per-
son in possession of his freedom. Thus, our works should

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be presented to the public in a double aspect of negativity
and construction.

First, negativity. We are familiar with the great tradi-
tion of critical literature which goes back to the end of
the eighteenth century; it is concerned with separating
by analysis that which specifically belongs to each notion
from what tradition or the mystifications of the oppressor
have added to it. Writers like Voltaire or the Encyclo-
pedists considered the practice of this criticism as one of
their essential tasks. Since the matter and the tool of the
writer are language, it is normal for writers to think of
cleaning their instrument. This negative function of liter-
ature was, to tell the truth, ignored in the following cen-
tury, probably because the class in power made use of
these concepts which had been established on their behalf
by the great writers of the past, and because there was, at
the beginning, a kind of equilibrium among its institu-
tions, its aims, the kind of oppression it practised, and
the meaning it gave to the words it used. For example,
it is clear that in the nineteenth century the word "free-
dom" never designated anything but political freedom
and that the words "disorder" or "license" were reserved
for all other forms of freedom. Similarly, the word rev-
olution necessarily referred to a great historical revolu-
tion, the one of '89. And as the bourgeoisie, by a very gen-
eral convention, neglected the economic aspect of this
revolution, as, in its history, it barely mentioned the
name of Gracchus Baboeuf and the views of Robespierre
and Marat so that it might give its official respect to
Desmoulins and the Girondists, the result was that any
political insurrection which succeeded could be desig-

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

nated a revolution, and that this denomination could be
applied to the events of 1830 and 1848 which, at bottom,
merely brought about a simple change of the directing
personnel.

This narrowness of vocabulary caused the picture to
lack certain aspects of the historical, psychological, and
philosophical reality, but as these aspects were not mani-
fest by themselves, as they corresponded to a dull malaise
in the consciousness of the masses or the individual rather
than to effective factors of social or personal life, one
was struck by the dry property of the words and by the
immutable clearness of the significations rather than by
their insufficiency. In the eighteenth century to write a
Philosophical Dictionary was secretly to undermine the
class in power. In the nineteenth, Littre and Larousse
were positivistic and conservative bourgeois; their diction-
aries aimed solely at verifying and settling matters. The
crisis of language which marked the literature between
the two wars was the result of the fact that after a silent
maturation, neglected aspects of the historical and psy-
chological reality passed abruptly to the first level. Yet,
we have the same verbal apparatus at our disposal for
naming them. Perhaps it may not be too serious be-
cause in most cases it is only a matter of deepening con-
cepts and changing definitions. For example, when we
have rejuvenated the meaning of the word "Revolution"
by pointing out that what should be designated by this
vocable is a historical phenomenon involving the change
of the regime of property, the change of political per-
sonnel, and the recourse to insurrection, we shall have
proceeded, without great effort, to the rejuvenation of a

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sector of the French language, and the word, impreg-
nated with a new life, will be off to a new start. It must
be noted, however, that the fundamental job to be done
on language is of a synthetic nature, whereas in Voltaire's
century it was analytic; it is necessary to enlarge, to
deepen, and to open the doors and to let the troop of
new ideas enter while controlling them as they pass by.
In other words, to be anti-academic.

Unfortunately, what complicates our job in the ex-
treme is that we are living in a century of propaganda.
In 1914 the two opposing camps were arguing only the
question of God; it still wasn't too serious. Today, there
are five or six enemy camps which want to wrest the
key-notions from each other because these are what exert
the most influence on the masses. It will be recalled how
the Germans preserved the external aspect, the title, the
arrangement of articles, and even the typographical char-
acter of the pre-war French newspapers and used them
to diffuse ideas which were entirely opposed to those
which we were accustomed to find in them. They thought
that we would not notice the difference in the pills since
the coating did not change. The same with words: each
party shoves them forward like Trojan horses, and we
let them enter because they make the nineteenth-century
meaning of the words shine before us. Once they are in
place, they open up, and strange, astounding meanings
spread out within us like armies; the fortress is taken be-
fore we are on guard. Thereafter, neither conversation
nor argument is any longer possible. Brice Parain saw
this quite clearly; to quote him roughly, "If you use the
word freedom in front of me, I start fuming, I approve,

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

or I contradict, but I don't understand what you mean
by it. So we're talking in the dark. 53 That's true, but it's
a modern evil. In the nineteenth century Littre's dic-
tionary might have gotten us together; before this war
we could have had recourse to the vocabulary of Lalande.
Today, there is no longer an arbiter.

Nevertheless, we are all accomplices because these slip-
pery notions serve our dishonesty. That's not all ; linguists
have often noted that in troubled periods words preserve
the traces of the great human migrations. A barbaric
army crosses Gaul, the soldiers amuse themselves with
the native language, and so it stays twisted for a long
time. Our own still bears the marks of the Nazi invasion.
The word "Jew" formerly designated a certain type of
man; perhaps French anti-Semitism had given it a slight
pejorative meaning, but it was easy to brush it off. To-
day one fears to use it; it sounds like a threat, an insult,
or a provocation. The word "Europe" formerly referred
to the geographical, economic, and political unity of the
Old Continent. Today, it preserves a musty smell of
Germanism and servitude. Even the innocent and ab-
stract term "collaboration" is in disrepute. On the other
hand, as Soviet Russia is now at a standstill the words
which the communists used before the war have also
stopped short. They stop in the middle of their meaning,
just as the Stalinist intellectuals do in the middle of their
thought, or else they get off on side-paths. The transfor-
mations of the word "Revolution" are quite significant in
this respect. In an earlier chapter I quoted the saying of
a journalist who was a collaborator: "Stand firm! That's
the motto of the Nationalist Revolution." To which I

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now add this one which comes from a communist in-
tellectual: "Produce! That's the real Revolution!"
Things have gone so far that recently in France one could
have read on the election posters : "To vote for the Com-
munist Party is to vote for the defense of property." 1
Vice-versa, who is not a socialist today? I remember a
writers' congress all of them leftists which refused
to use the word socialism in a manifesto "because it
was too discredited." And the linguistic reality is today
so complicated that I still do not know whether these
authors rejected the word for the reason they gave or
because it was so down at the heel that it scared them.
Moreover, we know that in the United States the term

1. And the idea of freedom? The fantastic criticisms that have been made
of existentialism prove that people no longer mean anything by it. Is it their
fault? Here is the P.RJL, antidemocratic and antisocialist, recruiting former
fascists, former collaborators and former P.S.F.'s. Yet it calls itself the Repub-
lican Party of Freedom (Parti republic ain de la libert). If you are against
it, it means that you are therefore against freedom. But the communists also
refer to freedom; only it is Hegelian freedom, which is an assumption of
necessity. And the surrealists too, who are determinists. A young simpleton
said to me one day, "After The Flies, in which you spoke splendidly about the
freedom of Orestes, you betrayed yourself and you betrayed us by writing
Being and Nothingness and by failing to set up a deterministic and ma-
terialistic humanism." I understand what he meant: that materialism delivers
man from his myths. It is a liberation, I agree, but in order the better to
enslave him. However, from 1760 on, some American colonists defended
slavery in the name of freedom: if the colonist, citizen, and pioneer wants to
buy a negro, isn't he free? And having bought him, isn't he free to use him?
The argument has remained. In 1947 the proprietor of a public swimming
pool refused to admit a Jewish captain, a war hero. The captain wrote letters
of complaint to the newspapers. The papers published his protest and con-
cluded: "What a wonderful country America is! The proprietor of the pool
was free to refuse admittance to a Jew. But the Jew, a citizen of the United
States, was free to protest in the press. And the press, which, as everybody
knows, is free, mentions the incident without taking sides. Finally, everybody
is free." The only trouble is that the word freedom which covers these very
different meanings and a hundred others is used without anyone's thinking
that he ought to indicate the meaning he gives it in each case.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

communist designates any American citizen who does
not vote for the Republicans, and in Europe the word
fascist means any European citizen who does not vote
for the communists. To confuse things still more, we
must add that French conservatives state that the Soviet
regime which, however, subscribes neither to a theory
of race, nor a theory of anti-Semitism, nor a theory of
war is one of national socialism, whereas on the left
it is said that the United States which is a capitalist
democracy with a loose dictatorship of public opinion
borders on fascism.

The function of a writer is to call a spade a spade.
If words are sick, it is up to us to cure them. Instead of
that, many writers live off this sickness. In many cases
modern literature is a cancer of words. It is perfectly all
right to write "horse of butter" but in a sense it amounts
to doing the same thing as those who speak of a fascist
United States or a Stalinist national socialism. There is
nothing more deplorable than the literary practice which,
I believe, is called poetic prose and which consists of
using words for the obscure harmonics which resound
about them and which are made up of vague meanings
which are in contradiction with the clear signification.

I know: the purpose of a number of writers was to
destroy words as that of the surrealists was to destroy
conjointly the subject and the object; but it was the ex-
treme point of the literature of consumption. But today,
as I have shown, it is necessary to construct. If one starts
deploring the inadequacy of language to reality, like
Brice Parain, one makes himself an accomplice of the
enemy, that is, of propaganda. Our first duty as a writer

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is thus to re-establish language in its dignity. After all,
we think with words. We would have to be quite vain
to believe that we are concealing ineffable beauties which
the word is unworthy of expressing. And then, I distrust
the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.
When it seems impossible to get others to share the cer-
tainties which we enjoy, the only thing left is to fight,
to burn, or to hang. No. We are no better than our life,
and it is by our life that we must be judged; our thought
is no better than our language, and it ought to be judged
by the way it uses it. If we want to restore their virtue
to words, we must carry on a double operation; on the
one hand, an analytical cleaning which rids them of their
adventitious meanings, and, on the other hand, a syn-
thetic enlargement which adapts them to the historical
situation. If an author wished to devote himself com-
pletely to this job, there would be more than enough
for a whole lifetime. With all of us working on it together,
we shall do a good job of it without too much trouble.
That is not all, we are living in the age of mystifica-
tions. Some are fundamental ones which are due to the
structure of society; some are secondary. At any rate, the
social order today rests upon the mystification of con-
sciousness, as does disorder as well. Nazism was a mystifi-
cation; Gaullism is another; Catholicism is a third. At
the present there can be no doubt that French com-
munism is a fourth. Obviously we could pay no attention
to it and do our work honestly without aggressiveness.
But as the writer addresses the freedom of his reader, and
as each mystified consciousness, insofar as it is an ac-
complice of the mystification which enchains it, tends

285

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

to persist in its state, we will be able to safeguard litera-
ture only if we undertake the job of de-mystifying our
public. For the same reason the writer's duty is to take
sides against all injustices, wherever they may come
from. And as our writings would have no meaning if we
did not set up as our goal the eventual coming of freedom
by means of socialism, it is important in each case to
stress the fact that there have been violations of formal
and personal liberties or material oppression or both.
From this point of view we must denounce British politics
in Palestine and American politics in Greece as well as
the Soviet deportations. And if we are told that we are
acting as if we were quite important and that it is quite
childish of us to hope that we can change the course of
the world, we shall reply that we have no illusions about
it, but that nevertheless it is fitting that certain things
be said, even though it be only to save our faces in the
eyes of our children, and besides we do not have the
crazy ambition of influencing the State Department, but
rather the slightly less crazy one of acting upon the opin-
ion of our fellow citizens.

Yet, we must not let off great inkwell explosions care-
lessly and without discernment. In each case we must con-
sider* the aim in view. Former communists would like to
make us see Soviet Russia as enemy number one because
she has corrupted the very idea of socialism and has trans-
formed the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dicta-
torship of the bureaucracy. Consequently, they would like
us to devote all our time to stigmatizing its extortion and
its violence; at the same time they point out to us that ca-
pitalist injustices are highly obvious and are not likely to

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deceive anyone; thus, we would be wasting our time ex-
posing them. I am afraid that I surmise only too well the
interests which this advice serves. Whatever the putative
violence may be, still, before passing judgment upon it,
it is advisable to consider the situation of the country
which commits it and the perspectives in which it has
committed it. It would first be necessary to prove,
for example, that the present machinations of the Soviet
government are not, in the last analysis, dictated by its
desire to protect the revolution which has stalled and to
"hold on 5 ' until the moment when it will be possible to
resume its march forward. Whereas American anti-
Semitism and negrophobia, our own colonialism and the
attitude of the powers in regard to Franco, often lead to
injustices which are less spectacular but which aim none
the less at perpetuating the present regime of the ex-
ploitation of man by man. It will be said that everybody
knows this. That may be true, but if nobody says it,
what good does it do us to know it? Our job as a writer
is to represent the world and to bear witness to it. Be-
sides, even if it were proven that the Soviet Union and
the Communist Party are pursuing genuinely revolution-
ary ends, that would not exempt us from judging the
means. If one regards freedom as the principle anji the
goal of all human activity, it is equally false that one
must judge the means by the end and the end by the
means. Rather, the end is the synthetic unity of the
means employed. Thus, there are means which risk de-
stroying the end which they intend to realize because by
their mere presence they smash the synthetic unity which
they wish to enter.

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WHAT IS LITERATURE?

The attempt has been made to determine by quasi-
mathematical formulas the conditions under which a
means may be called legitimate; in these formulas are in-
cluded the probability of the end, its proximity, and what
its returns are in regard to the cost of the means em-
ployed. One might think that we were back at Bentham
and the arithmetic of pleasures. I am not saying that a
formula of this kind might not be applied in certain
cases, for example, in the hypothesis, itself quantitative,
in which a certain number of lives must be sacrificed to
save others. But in the majority of cases the problem is
quite different; the means employed introduce a qualita-
tive alteration into the end and consequently are not
measurable. Let us imagine that a revolutionary party
systematically lies to its militants in order to protect them
against uncertainties, crises of conscience, and adverse
propaganda. The end pursued is the abolition of a regime
of oppression; but the lie is itself oppression. May one
perpetuate oppression with the pretext of putting an end
to it? Is it necessary to enslave man in order the better
to free him? It will be said that the means is transitory.
Not if it helps create a lied-to and lying mankind; for
then the men who take power are no longer those who
deserve to get hold of it; and the reasons one had for
abolishing oppression are undermined by the way he
goes about abolishing it. Thus, the politics of the Com-
munist Party which consists of lying to its own troops, of
calumniating, of hiding its defeats and its faults, com-
promises the goal which it pursues. On the other hand,
it is easy to reply that in war and every revolutionary
party is at war one can not tell soldiers the whole

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

truth. Thus, we have here a question of measure. No
ready-rnade formula will excuse us from an examination
in each particular case. It is up to us to make this exami-
nation. Left to itself, politics always takes the path of
least resistance, that is, it goes downhill. The masses,
duped by propaganda, follow it. So who can represent
to the government, the parties, and the citizens the means
that are being employed, if not the writer? That does
not mean that we must be systematically opposed to the
use of violence, I recognize that violence, under what-
ever form it may manifest itself, is a setback. But it is
an inevitable setback because we are in a universe of
violence; and if it is true that recourse to violence against
violence risks perpetuating it, it is also true that it is the
only means of bringing an end to it. A certain news-
paper in which someone wrote a rather brilliant article
saying that it was necessary to refuse any complicity with
violence wherever it came from had to announce the
following day the first skirmishes of the Indo-Chinese
war. I should like to ask the writer to-day how we can
refuse to participate indirectly in all violence. If you say
nothing, you are necessarily for the continuation of the
war; one is always responsible for what one does not try
to prevent. But if you got it to stop at once and at any
price, you would be at the origin of some massacres and
you would be doing violence to all Frenchmen who have
interests down there. I am not, of course, speaking of
compromises, since war is born of compromise. Violence
for violence; one must make a choice, according to other
principles. The politician will wonder whether trans-
portation of troops is possible, whether by continuing

289

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

the war he will alienate public opinion, what the inter-
national repercussions will be. It is incumbent upon the
writer to judge the means not from the point of view of
an abstract morality, but in the perspectives of a pre-
cise goal which is the realization of a socialist democracy.
Thus, we must mediate upon the modern problem of
ends and means not only in theory but in each concrete
case.

Evidently, there is a big job to be done. But even if we
consume our life in criticism who can reproach us? The
task of criticism has become total; it engages the whole
man. In the eighteenth century the tool was forged; the
simple utilization of analytical reason was enough to
clean the concepts; to-day when it is necessary both to
clean and to complete, to push to their conclusions no-
tions which have become false because they have stopped
along the way, criticism is also synthetic. It brings into
action all our faculties of invention; instead of limiting
itself to making use of a reason already established by
two centuries of mathematics, on the contrary, it is this
criticism which will form modern reason so that, in the
end, it has creative freedom as its foundation. Doubtless,
it will not by itself bring about a positive solution. But
what does today? tsee all about us only absolute formulas,
patchwork, dishonest compromises, outdated and hastily
refurbished myths. Even if we did nothing but puncture
all these inflated wind-bladders one by one, we would
be well deserving of our readers.

However, around 1750 criticism was a direct prepara-
tion for changing the regime since it contributed to the
weakening of the oppressing class by dismantling its

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

ideology. The case today is not the same since the con-
cepts to be criticized belong to all ideologies and all
camps. Thus, it is no longer negativity alone which can
serve history even if it finally does become a positivity.
The individual writer may limit himself to his critical
task, but our literature as a whole must be, above all,
construction. That does not mean that we must make
it our business, individually or as a group, to find a new
ideology. In every age, as I have pointed out, it is liter-
ature in its entirety which is the ideology because it
constitutes the synthetic and often contradictory 1 totality
of everything which the age has been able to produce
to enlighten itself, taking into account the historical
situation and the talent. But since we have recognized
that we have to produce a literature of praxis, we ought
to stick to our purpose to the very end. We no longer
have time to describe or narrate; neither can we limit
ourselves to explaining. Description, even though it be
psychological, is pure contemplative enjoyment; explana-
tion is acceptance, it excuses everything. Both of them
assume that the die is cast. But if perception itself is ac-
tion, if, for us, to show the world is to disclose it in the
perspectives of a possible change, then, in this age of
fatalism, we must reveal to the reader his power, in each
concrete case, of doing and undoing, in short of acting.
The present situation, revolutionary by virtue of the fact
that it is unbearable, remains in a state of stagnation be-
cause men have dispossessed themselves of their own
destiny; Europe is abdicating before the future conflict

1. Because, like Mind, it is of the type of what I have elsewhere called
"detotalized totality."

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and seeks less to prevent it than to range itself in advance
in the camp of the conquerors. Soviet Russia considers
itself to be alone and cornered, like a wild boar sur-
rounded by a fierce pack ready to tear it apart. The
United States, which does not fear the other nations, is
infatuated with its own weight; the richer it is, the
heavier it is. Weighed down with fat and pride, it lets
itself be rolled toward war with its eyes closed. As for
us, we are writing for only a few men in our own coun-
try and a handful of others in Europe. But we must
go seek them where they are, lost in their age like needles
in a haystack, and we must remind them of their power.
Let us take them in their job, in their family, in their
class, and in their country, and let us examine their servi-
tude with them, but let it not be to push them deeper into
it; let us show them that in the most mechanical gesture
of the worker there is already the complete negation of
oppression; let us never envisage their situation as factual
data but as a problem; let us point out that it keeps its
form and its boundaries of infinite possibilities, in a word,
that it has no other shape than what they confer upon
it by the way they have chosen to go beyond it; let us
teach them both that they are victims and that they are
responsible for everything, that they are at once the op-
pressed, the oppressors, and the accomplices of their own
oppressors and that one can never draw a line between
what a man submits to, what he accepts, and what he
wants; let us show that the world they live in is never de-
fined except in reference to the future which they project
before them, and since reading reveals their freedom to
them, let us take advantage of it to remind them that this

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

future in which they place themselves in order to judge
the present is none other than that in which man rejoins
himself and finally reaches himself as a totality by the
coming of the City of Ends, for it is only the presentiment
of Justice which permits us to be shocked by particular
injustices, that is, to put it precisely, to regard them as
injustices; finally, in inviting them to see things from the
viewpoint of the City of Ends so they may understand
their age, let us not allow them to remain in ignorance
of the aspects of this age which favor the realizing of
their aim.

The theatre was formerly a theatre of "characters."
More or less complex, but complete, figures appeared on
the stage, and the situation had no other function than
to put these characters into conflict and to show how
each of them was modified by the action of the others. I
have elsewhere shown how important changes have taken
place in this domain; many authors are returning to the
theatre of situation. No more characters; the heroes are
freedoms caught in a trap, like all of us. What are the
issues? Each character will be nothing but the choice of
an issue and will equal no more than the chosen issue. It
is to be hoped that all literature will become moral and
problematic like this new theatre. Moral not moraliz-
ing; let it show simply that man is also a value and that
the questions he raises are always moral. Above all, let it
show the inventor in him. In a sense, each situation is a
trap there are walls everywhere. I've expressed my-
self poorly: there are no issues to choose. An issue is in-
vented. And each one, by inventing his own issue, invents
himself. Man must be invented each day.

293

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

The point is that all is lost if we want to choose between
the powers which are preparing for war. To choose the
U.S.S.R. is to give up civil liberties without even being
able to hope to gain material freedom; the retardation of
its industry prohibits it, in case of victory, from organ-
izing Europe; hence, indefinite prolongation of dictator-
ship and misery. But after the victory of the United States,
when the C.P. would be annihilated and the working
class discouraged, disoriented, and if I may risk a neol-
ogism atomized, when capitalism would be more pitiless
since it would be master of the world, can any one believe
that a revolutionary movement which would start from
zero would have much chance? But aren't there unknown
factors to be reckoned with? That's just it ! I reckon with
what I know. But who is forcing us to choose? Does one
really make history by choosing between given wholes
simply because they are given, and by siding with the
stronger? In that case in 1940 all Frenchmen should
have sided with Germany as the collaborators proposed.
Now, it is obvious that, on the contrary, historical ac-
tion can never be reduced to a choice between raw data,
but that it has always been characterized by the invention
of new solutions on the basis of a definite situation. Re-
spect for "wholes 5 - 5 is pure and simple empirism. Man
has long since gone beyond empiricism in science, ethics,
and individual life; the fountain-makers of Florence
"chose between wholes 55 ; Toricelli invented the weight
of air I say that he invented it rather than discovered it
because when an object is concealed from all eyes, one
must invent it out of whole cloth in order to be able to
discover it. When it is a question of historical fact, why,

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SITUATION OF THE WRITER IN 1947

out of what inferiority complex, do our realists deny this
faculty of creation which they proclaim everywhere else?
The historical agent is almost always the man who in the
face of a dilemma suddenly causes a third term to ap-
pear, one which up to that time had been invisible. It
is true that a choice must be made between the U.S.S.R.
and the Anglo-Saxon bloc. As for socialist Europe, there's
no "choosing" it since it doesn't exist. It is to be made.
Not by starting with the England of Mr. Churchill, nor
even with that of Mr. Bevin, but by starting on the con-
tinent, by the union of all countries which have the same
problems. It will be said that it is too late, but what does
anyone know about it? Has anyone even tried? Our re-
lations with our immediate neighbors always take place
through Moscow, London, or New York; doesn't anyone
know that there are direct ways? Whatever the case may
be and as long as circumstances do not change, the for-
tunes of literature are tied up with the coming of a so-
cialist Europe, that is, of a group of states with a demo-
cratic and collectivist structure, each of which, while wait-
ing for something better, would be deprived of part of
its sovereignty for the sake of the whole. The hope of
avoiding war dwells in this hypothesis only; in this hy-
pothesis only will the circulation of ideas remain free and
will literature again find an object and a public.

Quite a number of jobs at the same time and quite
disparate. It's true. But Bergson has well shown that the
eye an extremely complicated organ if you regard it
as a juxtaposition of functions appears somewhat
simple if it is replaced in the creative movement of evolu-

295

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

tion. The same with the writer; if you enumerate by
analysis the themes which Kafka develops and the ques-
tions he raises in his books, and if you then go back to the
beginning of his career and consider that for him these
were themes to be treated and questions to be raised, you
will be alarmed. But that's not the way he's to be taken.
The work of Kafka is a free and unitary reaction to the
Judaeo-Christian world of Central Europe. His novels are
a synthetic act of going beyond his situation as a man, as
a Jew, as a Czech, as a recalcitrant fiance, as a tubercular
etc., as were also his handshake, his smile, and that gaze
which Max Brod so admired. Under the analysis of the
critic they break down into problems; but the critic is
wrong; they must be read in movement.

I have not wanted to hand out extra assignments to the
writers of my generation. What right would I have to do
so, and has anybody asked me to? Nor do I have any taste
for the manifestoes of a school. I have merely tried to de-
scribe a situation with its perspectives, its threats, and its
demands. A literature of praxis is coming into being in
the age of the unfindable public. That's the situation. Let
each one handle it in his own way. His own way, that is,
his own style, his own technique, his own subjects. If the
writer is imbued, as I am, with the urgency of these
problems, one can be sure that he will offer solutions to
them in the creative unity of his work, that is, in the in-
distinctness of a movement of free creation. 1

There is no guarantee that literature is immortal. Its

1. Camus' The Plague, which has just been published, seems to me a good
example of a unifying movement which bases a plurality of critical and con-
structive themes on the organic unity of a single myth.

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chance today, its only chance, is the chance of Europe, of
socialism, of democracy, and of peace. We must play it.
If we writers lose it, too bad for us. But also, too bad for
society. As I have shown, the collectivity passes to re-
flection and meditation by means of literature; it ac-
quires an unhappy conscience, a lopsided image of itself
which it constantly tries to modify and improve. But,
after all, the art of writing is not protected by immutable
decrees of Providence; it is what men make it; they choose
it in choosing themselves. If it were to turn into pure
propaganda or pure entertainment, society would wallow
in the immediate, that is, in the life without memory of
hymenoptera and gasteropods. Of course, all of this is not
very important. The world can very well do without liter-
ature. But it can do without man still better.

297

INDEX

Abstract Universality, 154
Acharnians, the, 85
Achilles, 85
Action Frangaise, 187
Aesthetic Joy, 58, 59
Aesthetic Purism, 27
Africa, 78

Alain, 200, 202, 204, 209
Algiers, 71, 166
Aihambra, 31
Alquie, 191, 193
America, 243, 283
American Neo-Realism, 196
Americans, the, 68, 188, 268
Amsterdam, 214
Analysis, 104
Angoule'me, 68
Anouilh, 242
Antiquity, 92, 108
Aragon, 165, 198
Ariel, 75

Arland, Marcel, 173, 174
Arlesienne, the, 261
Artificialism, 130
Artistic Style, 121
Asiatics, the, 188
Augier, fimile, 117
August the fourth, 107
Aupick General, 182
Aurelien, 271
Auschwitz, 217
Austria, 57
Aveline, 198

Baboeuf, Gracchus, 279

Bach, 31

Bagdad, 247

Balzac, 325

Bara, 263

Barbey, d'Aurevilly, 125, 139

Barres, 168, 169

Bastille, the, 107

Battaille, George, 85, 192, 211

Baudelaire, 80, 125, 127, 128, 182,

242

B. B. C., 244, 245
Beaumarchais, 94
Bel Ami, 131
Bella, 29

Benda, 65, 67, 86, 108, 158
Bentham, 288
Bergotte, 29
Bergson, 16, 181, 295
Bernard, 132
Berrichon, Paterae, 28
Beucler, 198
Bevin, 296
Bible, the, 261
Billy, 165
Blanis, Abbe", 57
Bloch Michel, 222
Blum, 168
Boccaccio, 138
Boileau, 209
Bolshevism, 73
Bonnefoy, Yves, 197
Bordeaux, 34, 117, 135, 173

299

INDEX

Bost, Pierre, 198, 203
Bourget, 117, 135
Bovary, Charles, 212
Breton, 18, 132, 164, 165, 179-181,
185-187, 190, 192, 193, 198, 208
Brod, Max, 296
Bruges, 101

Brunschvicg, Leon, 202, 216
Budapest, 252
Byron, 166

Caillois, 147

Camus, 223, 296

Canada, 242

Carneades, 179

Catharians, the, 30

Catherine, 101

Catholic universe, the, 153

Catholicism, 285

Cathos, 94

Causality, 55

"Causality without cause", 55

Celine, 94

Cendrar, Blaise, 107

Central Europe, 242, 296

Cervantes, 126, 138

Cezanne, 56

Chack, Paul, 251

Chamson, 198, 203, 208

Charlus, 42

Chateaubriand, 32, 217

Chicago, 166

China, 212

Christianity, 83

Christian Revolution, the, 83

Chrysale, 171

Church, the, 85, 88, 89, 94, 99,

102, 103, 111, 150, 233, 247, 251,

267

Churchill, 295
City of Ends, 271, 272, 276, 293

Claudel, 141, 167, 174, 273

Cocteau, 165, 174, 211, 242

Combes, 182

Commune, the, 123, 124

Communist Party, 182, 184-186,
192, 197, 251, 253-256, 258-260,
262, 264, 265, 272, 273, 283, 287,
288, 294

Comte, Auguste, 183, 216

Concrete Universality, 155

Condorcet, 107

Copeau, 198

Corneille, 87, 116

Courier, P. L., 94

Croisset, 124

Cuverville, 168

Dachau, 217

Dali, 177

Dante, 126

Daudet, 143, 261

Decameron, the, 137

Decour, Jacques, 234

Democracy, 65

Descartes, 54, 87, 263

Des Esseintes, 130

Desmoulins, 279

Desnos, 187, 191

Determinism, 116, 130

Dhotel, Andre, 211

Diderot, 102, 107, 185, 231

Don Juan, 140, 171

Dos Passos, 228

Dostoievsky, 113

Dreyfuss, 257

Drcyfuss Affair, 201

Drieu la Rochelle, 64, 187, 189,

190, 198, 211
Duchamp, 176, 177, 194
Duhamel, 167
Dumas fils, 117

300

INDEX

Durkheim, 202, 272

Eiffel, Jean, 288

Eiffel Tower, 188

Eleatics, the, 206

Elbeuf, 168, 173

Eluard, 234

Encyclopedists, the, 107, 279

Engels, 262

England, 162, 244, 295

Epicurianism, 204

Epictetus, 181

Estaunig, 170

Estienne, Charles, 35

fitiemble, 75, 76

Euripides, 49

Europe, 78, 190, 204, 231-233, 244,

247, 249, 256, 279, 282, 284, 291-

293, 295, 297
Existentialism, 250, 283

Fabrice, 57

Fabrizio, 23

Faulkner, 228

Fenelon, 97

Fernandez, 27

Ferr, 263

First International, the, 246

Flaubert, 121, 123, 124, 125, 129,

180, 175, 227
Florence, 15, 294
Fontainebleau, 165
Fontanin, Daniel de, 71
Fouchet, Max-Pol, 193
Fournier, Alain, 178, 211
Fra Angelico, 210
France, 57, 69, 82, 124, 145, 163,

168, 170, 214, 215, 281, 232, 243,

244, 248, 256, 263-265
France, Anatole, 138
Franco, 287
Frederick, 101

Freedom, 48, 49-58, 56-67, 70, 74,
76, 86, 98, 104, 106, 107, 112,
114, 116, 120, 150, 151, 158-160,
181, 285, 240, 252, 271, 278, 282,
283, 285

French Academy, the, 89

Frenchmen, the, 78

Fromentin, 189

Frontenac, 168

Garaudy, 257, 264

Gaul, 282

Gaulle, General de, 192

GauUism, 285

Gautier, 49, 129

Genet, 49

Gerard, 84

Germans, the, 65, 73, 234, 281

Germany, 294

Gestapo, the, 234

Gide, Andr6, 34, 71, 128, 182, 167,

174, 208, 244, 245, 273
Giono, 267

Giraudoux, 26, 167, 211
Girondists, the, 279
Gobineau, 82
God, 19, 23, 52, 85, 88, 111, 112,

123, 129, 152, 170, 171, 174, 202,

215, 281
Golgotha, 9, 19
Goncourts, the, 121, 129
Greece, 286
Green, 211
Greuze, 11

Grignan, Mme. de, 87
Groult, Marius, 211
Gyp, 145

Hamp, Pierre, 285

Hector, 35

Hegel, 12, 141, 198, 194, 195

3OI

INDEX

Hegelian Freedom, 288
Hegelian Negativity, 149
Heidegger, 40, 238, 250
Heine, 175

Hemingway, 228, 289
Hermant, Abel, 145
Hesiod, 235
History, 86, 37
Hitler, 19, 74
Holy Story, 85
Hugo, 118, 267
Humanism, 84, 223

Idealism, 116, 118
Image, 17, 18, 85
Inferiority complex, 81, 295
Indies, the, 78
Indo-China, 78
Indo-Chinese war, the, 289
Intellectuals, the, 101
International, the, 149
Italy, 163, 237, 244, 247

Jacob, 112

Jaloux, Edmond, 117
Janet, 148
Jansenists, the, 222
Janus, 36
Jaspers, 196
Jaures, 168
Jeremiah, 78, 80
Jesuits, the, 26, 93, 222
Jews, the, 64, 80, 227
Jouhandeau, 174
Jour dan, 19
Journalism, 241
Joyce, 146, 228

Kafka, 45, 227, 259, 296
Kant, 46, 48, 271, 274

Klee, 35

Koestler, 72, 228
Ku Klux Klan, 183

La Bruyere, 89, 97, 138

Lafcadio, 132

La Fontaine, 84

Lamaitre, Jules, 262

Language, 9, 12, 13, 16, 20, 24, 25,

44, 46, 68, 176, 177, 234, 280,

281

Larbaud, 146

La Rochefoucauld, 93, 138
Larousse, 280
Lavedan, 145
Leibnitz, 217
Leiris, 16
Lenin, 262
Leonardo, 171
Le Sage, 138
Lessing, 121
Lettrism, 211
L'Humanit, 272
Lille, 118
L'Ing6nu, 69
Littr, 280
London, 71, 102, 163, 188, 244,

295

Louisiana, 78

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 120
Lyons, 118

Madelon, 94

Madrid, 252

Maistre, Joseph de, 257, 258

Mallarmd, 168, 164

Malraux, 80, 34, 211, 228, 241

Manicheans, 217

Manicheism, 72

Marcel, 158

Maquis, the, 234, 252

302

INDEX

Marat, 279

Maritain, 217

Martin du Gard, Roger, 71

Marx, 121, 180, 192, 241, 261, 262

Marxism, 119, 149, 193, 198

Marxists, the, 216

Material freedom, 277

Materialism, 196

Matriarchate, 53

Maupassant, 72, 139, 142

Mauriac, Claude, 165, 167, 191,

192, 211, 227, 234
Maurras, Charles, 183, 187, 257
Maurois, 167
Mecca, 254
Mechanism, 262
Menalque, 29, 71, 132
M6r6, Chevalier de, 87
Merleau Ponty, 8, 192
Message, 27, 28, 81-33
Metamorphosis, 53
Mezer, 195
Michelangelo, 171
Michelet, 118, 119
Microm6 gas, 69
Middle Ages, the, 99, 124, 186
Miller, Henry, 165
Mind, the, 114
Miro, 214

Misanthrope, the, 94
Mississippi, 170
Mogador, 189
Molotov, 259

Monarchy, the, 88, 92, 94
Monnier, 175
Morgan, Michele, 245
Montaigne, 32, 34, 187
Montesquieu, 188
Montmartre, 166
Montoire, 74
Moralism, 263
Morals, 96

Morand, 187, 188, 189
Morocco, 182
Mosca, 23

Moscow, 252, 254, 295
Movies, the, 241, 244, 269
Munich, 250, 252
Myerson, 141
Myth, the, 35, 36

Nathanael, 29, 71, 272

National Socialism, 67, 190

Naville, 185

Nazis, the, 64

Nazism, 73, 190, 191, 212, 285

Negativity, 103, 121, 153, 159,

174, 175, 186, 193, 231, 236, 246,

252, 279, 291
Neo-Ca tholicism, 1 24
Nerval, 166
Nevilly, 165
New York, 71, 160, 161, 239, 243,

295

Nicole, 93
Nietzsche, 128, 154
Nizan, 259, 278
North African literature, 166
Norway, 188

Oedipus Complex, 31

Ohnet, 117

Oradour, 217

Orestes, 283

Orgon, 171

Orient, the, 237

Oronte and Chrysale, 94

Pailleron, 117
Palermo, 214
Palestine, 286

303

INDEX

Paris, 165, 166, 219, 220, 248

Parmenides, 141

Parain, Brice, 24, 281, 284

Parnassians, the, 49, 128

Pascal, Blaise, 26, 34, 75, 87, 116,

175

Pastoureau, 192
Paulhan, 153
P6guy, 168
Peret, 187
Persians, the, 188
Perspectivism, 223
Petain, 73, 74, 251
Phedre, 96
Philaminte, 94
Philo, 179
Philoctete, 132
Picasso, 11, 15, 17
Pierre, Emmanuel, 19
Phrase Object, 16
Plato, 29, 196
Platonism, 210
Poe, 125
Poetry, 11, 35, 37, 122, 154, 196,

197, 207
Poland, 19
Politzer, 181, 262
Pope, the, 84
Populism, 200
Port Royale, 151
Pr^cieuses, the, 93, 94
Provost, Marcel, 117, 198, 199,

203, 204, 238, 267
"Prodigal Son", 11
Prose, 11, 20, 25, 26, 35, 36, 65,

154, 197

Proudhon, 121, 241
Proust, 42, 167, 168, 174
Provins, 68
Prudhonians, the, 149
Psychologism, 116
Psychoanalysis, 127, 176

Queneau, 165
Quietism, 182, 211

Rabelais, 126

Racine, 27, 96, 126, 151, 164

Radio, 241

Ralltewriter, 169, 194

Rambouillet, Mme. de, 87

Raskolnikov, 45, 50

Realism, 128, 129, 228, 229

Reformation, the, 109

Regionalism, 162

Renan, 119, 124

Renard, 129

Renaissance, the, 196

Restoration, the, 182

Rheims, 101

Ribbentrop, 259

Richard The Third, 29

Rigaut, 183

Rimbaud, 18, 28, 32, 166, 171, 179,

180

Rimbaud, Isabelle, 28
Robespierre, 279
Rolland, Romain, 166
Remains, 167
Romanticism, 88, 117, 199
Rousseau, 81, 32, 42, 107, 185
Russia, 244, 248, 253, 254, 256

Saar, the, 165
Sachs, Maurice, 183
Sade, 31

Saint-vremonde, 27, 87
Saint-Exup6ry, 211, 221, 288
Saint Lazare Station, 188
Saint Pol Roux, 18
Saint Vincent de Paul, 268

304

INDEX

Salacrou, 242

San Antonio, 239

Sand, Baronne Dudevant, 118

Sanseverina, 23

Sartre, Jean Paul, 75

Satan, 21T

Satanism, 171, 199

Schnitzler, 146

Scholasticism, 263

Schopenhauer, 237

Secularization, 86, 87

Seriousness, 186, 146

Sevigne, Mme. de, 87

Seville, 214

Shakespeare, 29

Shanghai, 214

Shelley, 166

Siegfried, 29

Socialism, 118, 124

Socialist Party, 184

South Carolina, 78

Soviet Russia, 185, 197, 282, 286,

287, 292

Soviets, the, 256
Spain, 237
Spartakus, 78
Spinoza, 150
Spirituality, 103
Spiritualization, 168
Stalingrad, 252

Stalinist Communism, 67, 216, 256
Steinbeck, 162
Stendhal, 32, 125
Stoicism, 204
Souday, Paul, 244
Sufi, 189
Surrealism, 132, 184, 148, 178,

181-184, 186, 187, 191-198, 214
Swann, 29
Style, 92
Syria, 188

Tainc, 74, 119

Tartarin, 143

Tel Aviv, 243

Terrorism, 153, 154

Teste, M., 29, 130

"The Hostage", 272

Thibaudet, 175

Third Republic, the, 118, 144, 168,

199

Tintoretto, 9, 18
Tito, 165

Torricelli, 222, 294
Total Literature, 240, 241
Traditionalism, 91
Trieste, 165
Trojan War, 35
Trotsky, 186, 197
Tulle, 217
Turks, the, 188

United States, 156, 243, 248, 255,

283, 284, 292
Universalization, 87
Universal man, 104
Utilitarianism, 111, 116, 250, 268
U. S. S. R., 248, 255, 256, 262,

294, 295

Vache, 183
Vatery, 20, 29, 37
Valles, Jules, 94, 120
Value, 49, 67
Van Gogh, 57
Vauvernargues, 116
Vercors, 72, 73, 74, 165
Verlaine, 164
Vermeer, 56
Vestal, 75
Vichy, 250

305

INDEX

Viet, Nam, 265 Xantippc, 29

Virginia, 78 Xenophon, 29

Voltaire, 102, 185, 231, 279, 281

West, Nathanael, 162

White House, the, 168 Zaslavsky, 228

Wright, Richard, 77, 78, 79, 80, Zola, 166

107, 166, 241, 276 Zurich, 214

306